Okay…I got one yes. That’s all I need. So here we have: Evolution of the Faery cover.

I’ve never really composed something new out of photographs before, so this was really a learning experience for me. These are the finished layers from the various pieces. I knew Carolyn wanted a leaf on water. I wanted nice rounded river rocks…and guess what we had just outside the back door?  This was just a closeup of our beach just below the waterfall.  I just took the photo image, rotated it so the long axis was height, then resized it to the 2:3 (8×12) size I wanted for the final cover.

The next step was getting that yin/yang, light/dark feel of the opening scene. I’d taken the shots in the early morning and I got a nice one that gave me just the look I wanted. I took that and set it as a second layer above the rocks, then played with the opacity until I found the right balance. I decided it still wasn’t quite right and I put a varigated blue layer between them. Again, I play with the opacity of the layers until I found the balance that let you see the rocks as well as the sparkle, with that mysterious hint of blue.

Then came the title.

I liked the “Faery Moon” suggestion, so I just began playing with it. I found a font, Arthur, that made it look really cool. All lower case, but what the hey. I began playing with it. I found a wonderful new (for me) “pattern” in Paint Shop Pro called “sparkle.” I used a base layer of blue, then did a flood fill with this “sparkle” at about 50% opacity. I then used the 3D filter “inner bevel” and played with the options until I wound up with something I liked. This included a lavendar light source, which gives the final product the variegated colors.

The shadow effect was inspired by a PSP tutorial I saw months ago, which did a fading, perspective shadow of lettering using masks and such. I tried to find it again, but couldn’t. But it made me think of doing it. Anyway, I took the title, flipped it, then did a “mesh warp” on it. (This, BTW, is using PSP 8. The newer version is on the machine that’s busy playing substitute office computer.) I put the two together, lowered the opacity on the reflection, put them on the rocks and sparkles and thought…hmmm…I’ve got something here. I took it in to Carolyn, and she grinned wickedly and said too bad it couldn’t ripple.

Hah!!! Just wait. I imported the png file into photoshop and used the “liquify” … well, they call it a filter, but you turn it on then draw your curser through the image and it does…well, this:

When I put that over the rocks I knew we were onto something….but it was still a bit flat, so I added a drop shadow, which let the lettering hover above the water.

Ooooo. Spoooooky!

I took it in to Carolyn again and said, I think we have the title. I don’t know if she dared disagree with me. I kinda had my heart set on it. I just loved the way this looked.

Now, came the hard part. The leaf and the eyeballs in the water drop. Because I’d used photos for the water, I didn’t really want to paint/draw the leaf. My art is fairly “painterly” as they say. It tends to be quite organic. I knew I could use Efanor’s eyes for the bubble, but I needed a good leaf. I wanted oak, because of the mystical association with oak. I found this lovely thing on a free site, but it was not quite twisty enough, so I attacked it with the mesh warp and pulled it about to give it a bit of recurve.

But it was still too bright, so I began playing with filters. When I hit “solarize,” I got this: And when I combined them, with the dark leaf on the bottom and the sunny one on top at about…40%, I think, I got a nice leaf, but I still wanted that sunshine into darkness effect. So I made another layer of the leaf and did a radial gradient on it: I put them all together, played with the various opacities of the layers and wound up with the leaf on the cover. I put in the same drop shadow I used on the title, but it was still not “floating” as much as I wanted, so I added another drop shadow, farther away and above. Don’t ask me where the light sources are. We’re on the boundary between the Real World and Faery, right?

Which brings us to the eyeball. I wasn’t sure how to make the eyes show up clearly in such a small bubble and when we were talking about it Carolyn (what would I do without her) said just use the little Efanor eyes.  So…that’s where we started. But I didn’t want it to just be black kitty eyes, so I made a transparent png and began to play. Like the leaf, this element was composed in a separated file, larger than the ultimate image would be, then shrunk down to fit in the final image.

I wanted the leaf to show through the bubble, so I made my base layer a midtone similar to the leaf, then put the eyeballs into a layer on top of it. Then, I put a layer between them to create the “eyes.” I put it between them because I wanted the photographic irises to retain that sharpness. The eyes are at 100% opacity, so the weird scatchiness of the enhancement layer is because I was building it blind. The pupils had gone all speckly in the transparency, so I put bright red behind them, gave it eyelashes and a Dubhain-esque forelock (he is a horse, afterall). The faint red along the top came after I put it onto the cover and wanted it to glow more. The blueish shadow was to cool down the bubble and reflect the blues in the title.

Then came the bubble itself. One thing I can’t do on this is show how to create the hard edge. To make the original background, I selected an oval and floodfilled it with the golden brown tone. Then, I cut a section away to give it a bubble’s flatish base. So, when the time came to do the bubble, I magic wand selected the brown, and that gave the hard edge to airbrush in the exterior of the bubble. I did it in white, then decided it was a bit to bright and washed it with a very transparent gold-toned gradient. Then smudged it around a bit. I softened the lower corners, smudging them up into the bubble. That’s the brown points down at the bottom. The final stage is the only layer on top of the eyeballs. I added the top shine and a little dash of red to the irises.

Time to put it all together. This shows the size of the initial insert of the bubble, its resize and positioning. In PSP, you choose the “deform” tool, which allows you to resize, rotate and position an image on a separate layer. Layers are the coolest thing ever invented. I’m only just begining to understand how to use them. I wasn’t liking how it looked, so I went out and watered the flowers and noted how the water beaded, and mostly, how the shadows happened around them. So, I came in, lessened the amount of shine and added shadows and bingo! That was it.