self-publishing fantasy | Stephanie Flint

Cover design process time! 😄

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Onward!

Okay, so the cover design process for The Dark Forest of Aneth has been through two major designs and two computers… since I actually started the original design a while back, but shelved it when I put revisions for Dark Forest on hold.

I use Daz Studio 3D, a program which allows me to place figures in a scene, change how they look, pose them, change the environment around them, light the scene, set the camera angles… all that good stuff.

The downside is that rendering the scene can take either a doozy of a graphics card (specifically NVidia, because that’s what Iray, the render engine, uses) OR it takes a doozy of a CPU.

Or it just takes a very long, long time and a very loud, loud computer fan.

Or both.

In the case of my unfortunate (now mostly dead) laptop, I had to render some of these scenes overnight… in the other room, because that fan was loud.

Then Isaac got Jade, a desktop computer we set up to handle work smoothly, gaming, and rendering. Which means that these scenes, which took forever on my old laptop, might take an hour or two to render at full size. And quietly.

(My ears greatly appreciate this… and so does my sleep cycle).

Now… on to the progress renders!

For the first render, I’d focused on setting… I wanted the black gate of the village deep in the forest, lit by turquoise light crystals.

Already we’ve got the issue of it being too dark, but it’s a work in progress.

Very dark rendering of a gate in a forest

While there were some intermediate steps here, I changed the lighting and focused on adding characters. I added a unicorn (chesnathé) framed by the gate, and pulled in Ro’nor and Zynia from their previous covers.

Still too dark.

Also, they’re kind of buried in the ferns. (They are supposed to be hiding, though…)

Very dark rendering of two people hiding while watching a rearing unicorn near a gate in the forest

In the next render, we have light!

Still dark and mysterious, but we can see the figures better.

Sort of.

The low contrast on this would make a poor cover thumbnail, but I digress.

I changed the lighting, played with angle and cover dimensions, adjusted poses, fought a lot with keeping trees from appearing in the middle of characters, and brought them just a bit out of hiding.

Dark rendering of two people crouched among forest ferns watching a rearing unicorn near a village gate

But…

I wasn’t happy with it.

I mean, don’t get me wrong, I still think the concept is cool. But it wasn’t working to match the other covers, visibility was a fight, and, making matters worse, Ro’nor is no longer in this scene. (Tndrec is, but I wanted the two main characters on the cover).

Maybe I’ll redo this specific version of the cover to include Tndrec as art for the next Legends of Cirena volume. Hmm. *Mental note to work on that.*

Many months later I tried again.

This time I brainstormed with Claude AI about what had gone wrong with the previous cover, what I liked, and what I hoped to have different. After some back and forth, it produced a spec sheet for me to reference.

I went back to Daz (on Jade this time… so much faster…) kept the two characters and the forest, but nixed the unicorn and village, changed the lighting, played more with mist, and…

VOILA!

Already so much happier! 😃

Two people nervously walk through a foggy forest with magic in their hands

I was already pretty happy with this, but I took the rendered image back into Claude and compared it against the comp and asked for suggested improvements. Made some changes, and came up with this for the raw render. (Technically I had one with depth of field applied, one without).

All the images so far have been what came out of Daz Studio, no Photoshop yet.

Now that I was happy with the base images, I took those into Photoshop CS6, touched up the illustration to fix little areas where the clothes weren’t sitting right or overlaying each other correctly, added the effects and title treatment for the series, and here’s the final!