Towards a Viable Production Time

FURTHER TO MY LAST POST, I wanted to say something about production time, as this is key to the viability of creating images like these for the self and indie publishing market.

The faux paintings (click the images for a larger view) were created using the method outlined in the tutorial here and from opening Poser (the 3D staging program) to exporting the faux painting from Art Rage (a natural media paint program), each one took just 90 minutes to produce.

This time was achieved largely thanks to preparation. I had a selection of characters already set up in Poser, I knew the content I had ready and had a good idea of what each of the images was going to be before I started. I also got lucky. Frankly, setting up a pose can take that long alone, so I try to use pre-set poses that I modify for my needs – it happens that in this instance, it proved very quick to set up.

Taking the resulting render into my photo editor (Affinity Photo), I used a practised process, starting with some adjustments layers (highlights/shadows, brightness/contrast, and colour balance), then using the Topaz Simplify plug-in. The result was then taken into Art Rage for painting.

Cover Tutorial - First Cover

FOR OUR FIRST COVER, I think we should keep it very simple. We're going to have a single figure and prop - and that's it. I'm going to assume that you have some working knowledge of the software used, though I'm not going to talk about any very sophisticated functions. I'm also going to assume that you've created the paperback templates as described in my previous post. The programs I'll be using are Poser, Affinity Photo, and Artrage.

For Poser, you could just as easily use DAZ Studio or Carrara. For Affinity, you could use Photoshop, Elements, or GIMP. For Artrage... well, you can use Painter.

Before continuing, I think it worth saying something about why I use a program like Poser to create my source images, rather than using photographic.