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.
Cover art for an upcoming project
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- RedImperator
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Cover art for an upcoming project
Any city gets what it admires, will pay for, and, ultimately, deserves…We want and deserve tin-can architecture in a tinhorn culture. And we will probably be judged not by the monuments we build but by those we have destroyed.--Ada Louise Huxtable, "Farewell to Penn Station", New York Times editorial, 30 October 1963
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- Darth Raptor
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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.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.
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I usually found myself using GIMP or PAint.net just to perform actions that have a shortcut there, as opposed to the labyrinthine Photoshop .Discombobulated wrote: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.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.
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).
Photography
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To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.
Genius is always allowed some leeway, once the hammer has been pried from its hands and the blood has been cleaned up.
To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.
- Metatwaddle
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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.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
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.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).
Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things... their number is negligible and they are stupid. --Dwight D. Eisenhower