Actually I thought I'd talk about my podfic covers, just a little bit. Because I can't draw for shit -- what I do is digital collage, sliding resources around on the screen until they look good -- but they're not un-adjacent to art either and I liked how some recent design choices worked out.
Sometimes it really is easy. I find a nice shot on Pixabay or some other digital commons, slap a title on it, and go. Sometimes I just need to trim a little, or run something through a funky filter:
[ID Cover of "Precious Jade", featuring Xiaoge's head and torso but in black and white, and reversed, so he looks like crystal against a black background. End ID]
Or fill in some blank space because the pic doesn't match the frame of an album cover:
[ID Cover of "I Have Seen Troy", featuring the painting “Hélène sur les remparts de Troie” by Gustave Moreau. A paler column on the left, where the title runs vertically, was made from an enlarged detail of the painting. End ID]
Sometimes I'm trying to turn This
into This:
[ID Two photos, one of the actor Bai Yu in a blue jacket next to a screenshot of him playing a long-haired Zhao Yunlan, followed by the cover of "Likeness", with a 'painting' of the god Kunlun, his turquoise robes and long hair tumbling about him. End ID]
Sometimes it's... kinda both?
For "Ghost at the Threshold" I got so super lucky with Pixabay searching. The fic involves two people in a kind of protective dreamscape of camping while trapped behind the heavy Bronze Doors of canon. I lucked into a camping scene -- with a guy in a black hoodie, no less! -- and a stock image of a gate with the centre helpfully cleaned in about five minutes.
[ID Two images, one of the ornamental arch of a stone door with a blank in the centre, the other a photo of two people under a tent-awning, chatting comfortably as smoke from a campfire rises between them. End ID]
“People Camping Tent” by 철민 박 – https://pixabay.com/photos/people-camping-tent-lifestyle-4817872/ (Pixabay Licence) “Doorway Palace Architecture” – https://pixabay.com/illustrations/doorway-palace-architecture-gate-1420437/ (Pixabay Licence)
A bit of tinkering and sliding around, and I got a lovely shot of that brightly coloured scene shining out from its dark frame:
[ID The camping scene shown above, slightly stylised, bright in the frame of the stone arch. End ID]
Only problem is, I needed to put a title on that and every time I tried I lost that gorgeous inky black and distracted from that vibrant wilderness scene. The wilderness was supposed to be the focus!!
So I experimented a bit with repeating the gate element to make a corridor to draw the eye up to the upper right quadrant even in a busier image. And since I was doing that anyway, an option presented itself for dealing with the text:
[ID Similar image to above, but the door element now looks like a corridor and the title "Ghost at the Threshold" trails from upper right to lower left, following the line of corridor. End ID]
I still get a lot of that inky black and I got the text to marry with the corridor, suggesting steps going downward.
Design was perpetrated.
I'm feeling very proud.
