VERY rough Starcrossed Cover

Stravo · Post by **Stravo** » 2003-11-08 01:43am

I think there is definately creativity and talent involved when you create something from other images, finding the right facial expressions on the character and the set up of the individual images to create a whole new design.

Wild Karrde · Post by **Wild Karrde** » 2003-11-08 08:59am

I swear, it's the last one... honestly!

Spanky The Dolphin · Post by **Spanky The Dolphin** » 2003-11-08 09:00am

Well, I don't know many novels with covers shaped like that.

Wild Karrde · Post by **Wild Karrde** » 2003-11-08 09:11am

That's because it's supposed to be a desktop picture.

Oberleutnant · Post by **Oberleutnant** » 2003-11-08 06:00pm

Damn, I now wish I had put more attention to my work, but here goes...

Edit: Just a quickie question to all: Can you guys distinguish the bluish starfield area over Palpatine and Thrawn, or should the hue difference be slightly more clearer?

My personal favourite is RedImperator's excellent cover. Simple, yet stylish and very elegant.

(Here's a "poster" I made for a forum meet-up I had in August.

The forum is about architecture, especially high-rises, so that's why the weird name. The funneh poster)

Alan Bolte · Post by **Alan Bolte** » 2003-11-09 10:00am

Can't find the pics I'm looking for to do it with, But my idea was to do a fairly simple cover with a chess board. The pieces would be from Wars and Trek chess games, or from the endless number of miniatures and other toys that exist. I was trying to find that site for whatever crossover space wargaming event was posted on SDnet at least once. Just can't find the site.

And no, can't see the starfield at all.

Cyborg Stan · Post by **Cyborg Stan** » 2003-11-09 04:15pm

A bandwagon? Let's jump on it!

RedImperator · Post by **RedImperator** » 2003-11-09 04:31pm

<singing> I started a trend, I started a trend. </singing>

I like what Seebian Wurm and Oberleutnant have done. For Seebian, I would just add one Trek element somewhere. I like Oberleutnant's general concept (and I can see the starfield--I like how it's a real subtle effect), but I would probably darken Gary Mitchell and find, if I could, a better picture of Thrawn. That one, which seems to be the only photograph of him on the internet, makes him look like the fourth member of the Blue Man Group, not an alien strategic mastermind.

Agent Fisher · Post by **Agent Fisher** » 2003-11-09 10:39pm

Wild Karrde wrote:*snip*

I swear, it's the last one... honestly!

this one I like

Alan Bolte · Post by **Alan Bolte** » 2003-11-09 10:45pm

Hmm... for Seebian's, adding another ship or a character would just ruin it. What if you change the A in STARCROSSED to a starfleet logo, maybe with the old style star in the middle. I'd swear I've seen that done somewhere, with class.

SeebianWurm · Post by **SeebianWurm** » 2003-11-10 12:11am

Alan Bolte wrote:Hmm... for Seebian's, adding another ship or a character would just ruin it. What if you change the A in STARCROSSED to a starfleet logo, maybe with the old style star in the middle. I'd swear I've seen that done somewhere, with class.

I am almost completely unversed in Star Trek, so I have no idea what you are referring to in either case.

Durandal · Post by **Durandal** » 2003-11-10 01:08am

Hm ... I might be interested in entering. Though I'm not going to turn in anything hacked up in an hour. It'll take time. So it depends on if I have that time.

DPDarkPrimus · Post by **DPDarkPrimus** » 2003-11-10 01:18am

Well, fuck me. Everyone else is making them, so I guess I'll make one too.

Stravo · Post by **Stravo** » 2003-11-10 01:28am

I like Cyborg Stan's starfield idea, god that must have been difficult to do, though (says the painshop noob)

Stravo · Post by **Stravo** » 2003-11-14 02:28am

Yet more Stravo shitty paint work. This is sad and pathetic but where else can one find the image of Leia as an Orion slave girl for an upcoming chapter?

El Moose Monstero · Post by **El Moose Monstero** » 2003-11-14 02:32am

Stravo wrote:Yet more Stravo shitty paint work. This is sad and pathetic but where else can one find the image of Leia as an Orion slave girl for an upcoming chapter?

In the Starcrossed page in Fanfics. Honestly Stavro, I think you're starting to lose it...

Stravo · Post by **Stravo** » 2003-11-14 02:33am

You take the fun out of my self promotion Lumberjack.

El Moose Monstero · Post by **El Moose Monstero** » 2003-11-14 02:35am

Muahaha, my work here is done...
*rides off, straight into an enormous grinning poster of Kirk*

Cyborg Stan · Post by **Cyborg Stan** » 2003-11-14 04:08am

Stravo wrote:I like Cyborg Stan's starfield idea, god that must have been difficult to do, though (says the painshop noob)

My original intention was for it to be part of a much larger picture, in the background. (Q would've also been a starfield object.) I figured that having a face made up of stars would be a very interesting way to depict a near-omnipotent being manipulting things in the background. However, it was extremely hard to find the right combinations of starfields that can pull it off, and the effect doesn't work if you make it too small. (It's a very subtle effect.)

However, I still wanted to see if the effect can be pulled off, so I went ahead with the picture, changing what I had in mind to something much simplier. The effect itself is actually rather easy to pull off - find a suitable starfield, and paste a greyscaled photo over in on a new layer, then change the blend option to 'Multiply'(*1). (I then added a bluish tint to help make it blend in with starfield used as the background.) After that, on a layer over the background I pasted the merged image, using a 'Lighten'(*2) blend mode. Actually, the part that took the most time was actually finding suitable starfield photos, most were either too sparse, the stars were too big, or the field too uneven.

The background starfield was simply a rotated version of a Leonid Starfield photo from here. The starfield I used to construct the objects I can't find at the moment, but it was a relatively dense one with a black background, alot of stars but none of the too large or too bright, which I think was a photo from a deep-space telescope. (I note that instead of a starfield, one can also use a picture of a nebula if they're careful.) Finally, there are also two chess pieces below the 'Starcrossed' title, a knight and a bishop, but they aren't very visible.

1) Multiply takes two pixels on different layers and multiplies them. In terms of the picture, it simply means that it took the relatively flat starfield underneath, and then darkened the stars along the same way the lightness (such as the skin) or darkness(such as the hair, shadows, or the parts cropped out) of the top image.

2) Lighten compares the two pixels and uses the brighter one as the perferred one. Simply put, where ever there was a star in the face and the an empty blue/black spot in the background, it would replace the empty spot with the star.