I’ve had several people ask me about the cool artwork for the Toby Streams the Universe cover, so I thought I’d do a post on it.  The image (not the text) was made for me by Ida Larsen, a digital artist living in Denmark.  She also did the art for Conjuring Raine.  I did a post on her artwork here.

Here’s how it happened.  I had a basic idea for Toby’s cover, and so I made a pathetic attempt at a sketch and sent it to Ida, who did me the service of not laughing at me.  She might have laughed behind my back, quietly to herself, but that’s cool, I respect that.  To my face she was nothing but professional.

I know, I know.  There’s a reason I’m a writer and not a visual artist.

Anyway.  So Ida came back with an image that was very close to my sketch (again, this is all the art, not the text) but, well, I hated it.  I mean, the guy’s face was just off, and I couldn’t figure out why.  It was sort of interesting, actually, to TRY to figure out why.  His eyebrows were too angled, his hair cut was too military, his lips were too sultry and down-turned.  I felt sorry for this guy whose face I was deconstructing in such a manner! I’m sure he’s lovely, I said to Ida.  I’m sure he’s a very nice person.

Well, turns out, he wasn’t a REAL person.  He was a 3-D model.  That is, I guess, he IS a real person, somewhere, who was scanned into a computer to create a posable, photo-realistic animated figure.  Weird, huh?  I didn’t even know they have those, but they do. Check it out.

But this, I decided, was why I didn’t like him.  He looked that tiny bit off that even the best CGI people look.  And in a close up, it was…disturbing.  In a non-identifiable way.  So…no.

Back to the drawing boards.  Or rather, back to the stock-image sites, looking for a man’s face, a real-live-human’s face, that would work.  I must have looked at THOUSANDS of pictures of young men, scrolling through thumbnail photos by the boatload.  It was bizarre.  This one’s too happy, that one’s too silly, his lower lip is too big, his eyes are too small, he looks too romance-cover, he looks too mean, he’s too old, he’s too young, he’s too sexy, he’s too funny.  ETC.  I sat with Sophie and iPad at one point, flicking through photos, and she started to get what I was going for too, and would say exactly what I was thinking about each one.  How did she catch on so quickly?  Perceptive kid, I guess.  Most of the faces were smiling, which automatically took them out of the running.  Those that weren’t smiling tended to be doing the sultry, come-hither look that I also didn’t want.  And if not that, then the guy looked MAD.  Arg! Happy, sexy, angry.  Doesn’t anyone take photos of young men that are outside those three emotions?

Finally I found this one, only part of a face, at the wrong angle, wrong hair, etc, but maybe Ida would be able to do something with it.

Turns out, she could.  Amazing to me that she could work her magic and from that, get this:

This image was one of many where we were trying to put in some wavy-lines to indicate something psychic or paranormal was going on.  Her initial image also didn’t have any clothes on, so I had her add a shirt, “kind of ratty looking,” which she did.  We tried lines going this way and that way, with sparkles, without, skinny, broad, all kind of lines.  Finally we settled on a vertical set of lines, like a wave, to sort of stand in for Toby’s “stream.”

At this point I started playing with fonts.  I’m using GIMP for this, which is a totally free image-making program like Photoshop, only did I mention that it is totally free?  It’s a bit tricky to learn at first so I recommend, whenever you want to do something, google for a youtube vid that will show you how.  Seeing the screen, seeing the program being used while someone explains it, is SOOOO much easier than trying to read text about complex image-processing click this, open that.  Say it with me:  Youtube.

Okay, so my first thought was to fill up the space with quirky words, like this image, but it seemed like too much.  The face was so strong an element already, a font that stood out so much made the whole cover kind of crazy and crowded. I tried about a million fonts.  Maybe two million.  I finally came back to very straight forward, plain, “boring” fonts.  Sigh.  I really like that quirky font!  I may yet find a use for it….  You can try out a bazillion fonts on places like myfonts.com which lets you preview whatever bit of text you want.  Very helpful before you buy.

Anyway, you can also see Ida added in the New York City skyline at that point, hopefully to identify the book as not an SF space sort of book, what with the galaxy theme and all. She and I were still going back and forth with various details but her work was coming to a close at this point.  She is so patient with me!

One way to make words stand out in front of a picture is to give them a drop-shadow, that is, the same word, made dark (or light) and put slightly off-kilter with the main word, to make it pop off the page a bit.  You can see a drop shadow in the word “universe” in the above image.  One day I gave some accidental key-command on GIMP and bam, all the text and all the text-shadows ended up all crazy, all over the page—and I really liked it.

Then came a bunch of experiments with upside down and backwards shadows, opacity, blurs, etc (you’ll remember a couple of posts back when I was trying a few of these out).  Finally I came on this, the final version.

I really like how the shadows aren’t where they are supposed to be, like Toby’s psychic perceptions of the world.  He is always seeing a double image, out of kilter with present time.  Sometimes it’s the past, sometimes it’s the future, but always it something he has to parse through to get to reality.  Well, I hope this image conveys something of that quality, anyway.

Lots of work from pathetic sketch to finished product!

All hail Ida and her super-powers!  And also hail to GIMP and Youtube videos! Without which, I would have to use that pathetic sketch on my cover.  And man, wouldn’t that suck.