When I put together my first cover, I had a
few ground rules. I wasn’t going to violate copyright. I’ve been there.
Copyright is sacrosanct. Remember Napster and Metallica? I was in the Metallica
camp all the way. Artists get ripped off and exploited enough. Geometrically
scaling that destruction via your home computer is beyond the pale. It’s a
crime against humanity.
Problem was, I didn't have much of a seed pot. I scanned a few copyright-safe images,
bought myself a fresh set of fonts, and went to work on my crappy little MS
Paint project. By the time I had finished torturing the image, I thought,
“Well, there’s a fine example of cover art.”
Honestly, it wasn’t so awful. It
had a big problem, though. It didn’t sell the book. Ignorant of the context,
I had modeled it after some of my favorite covers. Naturally, these covers
graced books by my favorite authors. These guys required no selling. In fact, they
were the selling points. Their covers generally put their names right at the
top, in big bold letters. So guess what mine looked like?
Flash forward a few weeks. After reading a
few books and trolling a few websites, I realized that I was going to have to
do a better job. So I sucked it up and went back to my old Linux box. I returned to something that I had been
noodling for years: GIMP.
I read that GIMP is an open-source
knock-off of PhotoShop. I don’t know anything about that. I could never afford
the big price tag of PhotoShop. I was aware of one thing, though. You got to
have the right tools. So I went to work on GIMP.
Next week: the GIMP Experience.
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