Update
November is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo for short), and I've decided to go at it again this year. I plan on cataloguing the work each day, in the hopes of keeping myself motivated to do an hour of writing each day.
You can find my actual NaNoWriMo profile here. The username was set up almost 2 years ago, back before I changed all other account names of mine that I was able to.
For this post, I'm going to go over the groundwork I did for the novel...
Plotting to Plot
The hardest part of any personal writing project I choose to undertake is always narrowing down the choices for what plot I'm going to go with. Actually coming up with ideas has never been a problem, in my life, at least where writing is concerned. At present, there are upwards of 1,000 different text files scattered through my computer dedicated solely to writing down plot and character ideas.
That in mind, I decided going into this year's November to go one of two ways. I would either clear out a large number of my short story ideas in an anthology, or work within the universe I've been building with novels and short stories since high school, to hopefully get back into that. In the end, I decided to go with a short story series within said universe. I already have a lot of groundwork done for these, so it'll save me mean less stress in the overall preparation.
Morgana Lugus Investigations
The premise for my short stories this year is inspired by the late and phenomenal C.J. Henderson, and many other fantastic writers who've done private investigators drawing from H.P. Lovecraft's universe. In that vein, I'm using a character I previously created, Morgana Lugus, a P.I. who works as a jack-of-all-trades problem solver in the the supernatural epicenter of the U.S., Arkham, Massachusetts.
The overall story is set within the Umbramundus, which is an urban fantasy universe I created based on omnism. A great deal of mythologies are mixed, and I thoroughly anticipate having my character facing off with vampires and Lovecraftian godhorrors alike.
Creating a Cover
For the overall design, I decided to go with a fairly simple, and honestly not entirely refined, illustration cover. I erred on the side of caution, as I'm not sure if I'm unable to submit my story without a cover or not, and I don't want to use other people's art for it. Considering how long it's been since I've done an illustration, the lack of practice certainly didn't help, either, so for what it is, I'm happy with the end result.
The actual content was created with 2 programs. The illustration was done entirely in Photoshop, using the brush and pencil tools, as well as the gradient tool for the final step. For a real project, I'd put the time into doing it with Illustrator, but the point of this project isn't really doing the cover art, so much as giving me something to relax with, so there you go.
When I finished my illustration, I plugged it in to a placeholder link I'd set up in InDesign, something that my current semester in college is helping me improve with. Once it was in place, I made a custom font mixing together the fonts Arkham and Celtic Garamond the 2nd, to create the text for the cover.
Below is the pictorial breakdown of my illustration.
 |
| Geometry |
 |
| Rough |
 |
| Lineart |
 |
| Colour Flats |
 |
| Shading |
 |
| FX, Touch-Ups, & Adjustments |
 |
| Text & Finalizing |
No comments:
Post a Comment