With the growing popularity of e-book sales, has it ever made you curious to know just who creates all these dazzling pictures? The artist in me (and my never ending curiosity) took me on a journey around the Internet, to peek into a graphic artist’s world. I couldn’t begin to fathom the creation of such beauty with a mouse, transferring what you see in your mind's eye and using your computer screen as a palette.
As you may have noticed in some of your e-cover art, real-life models (such as CJ Hollenbach) are often used to create a particular look, but I wanted to know who created the digital, mystical, magical warriors, and the hard bodied hunks who grace many other covers.
Vivid, stark portraits of futuristic planets, and lithe, long haired beauties, floating in a star dotted sky.
I was surprised to find that some authors choose to do their own cover art, adding yet another skill to their already talented tool box!
Linnea Sinclair, (www.starfreighter.com) an award-winning science fiction and fantasy author, creates her own unique brand of e-cover art. Ms. Sinclair’s impressive graphics background includes staff cover artist for NBI, as well as freelancing as a graphic artist.
Her covers often portray strong, gun-toting women, with inter-galactic mischief on their minds, much like the heroines in her best-selling novels! However, Linnea is able to produce covers for many different genres, and being a writer herself helps her understand the rather precise demands of the author.
Linnea says she works with Poser, an art program that allow you to create 3-D people, places and things, enhanced with PhotoImpact and Photoshop which she uses to add finishing touches, and fine tune her design.
Sahara Kelly, (www.saharakelly.com), ebook romantica author, not only writes the books, but creates her own spectacular cover art as well.
Ms. Kelly’s use of lush, full bodied color and sensuous design, gives the reader an image to take along for the ride when reading her books. She also uses Poser, which she describes as an amazingly useful but enormously complex 3D graphics tool, and does her 'post-production' work in Paint Shop Pro. Like many graphics artists, Sahara has a small gallery of her work on her website. One very noticeable feature about all these folks is their delight in sharing their works with the public.
For people interested in getting a closer look at the process and perhaps doing some themselves, there are tutorials on just about every single piece of graphics software available, along with free downloads of all kinds of props, textures and other necessary accessories. It seems that the pleasure of creating graphic arts need not be restricted to high-tech masterminds with expensive equipment - it can be just as easily enjoyed by at-home moms at their PC's.
Darrell King (www.pixelmonkey.net/) might well be considered one of the leading e-book cover artists. His award-winning artistic abilities are boundless; his creative genius has given him the opportunity to work with many authors, notably those from the publisher Ellora’s Cave. He personally designs covers for his wife Sherri L. King and many of the most erotic e- book covers have been created by Darrell. He continues to design unique, innovative graphic art. Darrell has created over sixty covers during his year in the business, including a New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Amazon.com bestseller, for business and finance.
Darrell’s resume touts the use of Adobe Photoshop 7, and Curious Labs Poser 5 to design his e-cover art. It all sounds a bit like Greek to this layman; however these are the programs that help bring to you, the e-book reader, all of those fabulously stunning images.
It is easy to tell that the tools used by all of the above artists are many, varied and complicated; there is an ever growing number of state-of-the-art graphics programs. From Paint Shop Pro to Adobe Photoshop 7, Bryce, Poser and Vue d'Esprit, these programs provide the tools needed to begin a journey into graphic art. Nearly all are available online, if you find yourself interested in beginning your cyber art training.
Along with tutorials, there are hundreds of sites that offer help with almost any program you choose to utilize while learning graphics.
To a layman, many of the tutorials for these programs seem rather overwhelming, however once I battened down the hatches, and really gave the tutorial a chance, I found myself beginning to understand some of the concepts behind creating the art.
Still, if you could have seen what I created you might well have laughed yourself senseless!
I tip my hat to the genius that is not only able to comprehend the programs, but create the beauty I see when purchasing an e-book. As for this artist, I'm sticking to my paints and brushes, and leaving the cyber art to the experts!
I’d like to personally thank the authors and artist mentioned above, they were more than gracious when sharing their information with this layman, their time and efforts were invaluable in helping me put this article together.
Submitted by Connie, March 2003
