StarDestroyer.Net BBS

So while The Humanist Inheritance is in rewrites, I'm already thinking about future novels, including Crash, a prequel to HI that tells the story of the Oil Crash, the collapse of the United States in its aftermath, and the rise of the Dominion (its companion novel would be Interregnum, covering the Second Civil War and its aftermath). While I was thinking about the book, I came up with this cover idea. Discombobulated put it together in the GIMP (which she claims she has no idea how to use), and I liked the result so much I decided to post it.



Don't hold your breath waiting for this one. My next project, tentatively titled The Empty Lands, is looking like it's unrelated to HI. Also, I've changed HI's title; I only refer to it as that on this board because that's the title everyone knows. There's a pretty big clue what the new title is on the cover of this book, right next to my own completely unbiased opinion about my skills and my expectations for HI's critical reception.

I imagine the story's changed a lot since I read it, but I do think The Last Great War is a superior title.

That cover looks good, too. Props to Discombobulated.

Darth Raptor wrote:I imagine the story's changed a lot since I read it, but I do think The Last Great War is a superior title.

That cover looks good, too. Props to Discombobulated.

Thanks. I really do have no idea how to use the GIMP. The learning curve is practically asymptotic. I have no idea why it's harder than Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro, but it's definitely the least intuitive program I've used. I hear it's pretty powerful, though.

Discombobulated wrote:

Darth Raptor wrote:I imagine the story's changed a lot since I read it, but I do think The Last Great War is a superior title.

That cover looks good, too. Props to Discombobulated.

Thanks. I really do have no idea how to use the GIMP. The learning curve is practically asymptotic. I have no idea why it's harder than Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro, but it's definitely the least intuitive program I've used. I hear it's pretty powerful, though.

I usually found myself using GIMP or PAint.net just to perform actions that have a shortcut there, as opposed to the labyrinthine Photoshop .
It's easier for somethings, but it's less versatile than a 650$ piece of software

The cover looks Great, although a bit of sharpening would look better (On "Crash" and the gas pump), as it looks a wee bit fuzzy. (Unless that's intentional).

DEATH wrote:I usually found myself using GIMP or PAint.net just to perform actions that have a shortcut there, as opposed to the labyrinthine Photoshop .
It's easier for somethings, but it's less versatile than a 650$ piece of software

Really? I find Photoshop pretty easy to use, but the easiest of all is Paint Shop Pro. That was the first graphics program I ever learned to use, and I still think it's the easiest. It also has stuff that I don't think Photoshop or the GIMP can do, namely using the magic wand to select by similar hue/saturation/luminosity/color, rather than just RGB values. But Photoshop has the unbelievably awesome magnetic lasso, not to mention the best brushes.

The cover looks Great, although a bit of sharpening would look better (On "Crash" and the gas pump), as it looks a wee bit fuzzy. (Unless that's intentional).

The fuzziness was a byproduct of scaling the text repeatedly, and we decided we liked it, so I applied a Gaussian blur to the pump and a little bit of one to the author's name so they'd match. Using it on the top text would have made it illegible.