{"id":4366,"date":"2016-08-23T10:02:20","date_gmt":"2016-08-23T14:02:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.webomator.com\/?p=4366"},"modified":"2016-08-23T10:02:20","modified_gmt":"2016-08-23T14:02:20","slug":"the-great-big-post-about-my-great-big-cover-for-slaves-of-the-switchboard-of-doom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.webomator.com\/wordpress\/2016\/08\/23\/the-great-big-post-about-my-great-big-cover-for-slaves-of-the-switchboard-of-doom\/","title":{"rendered":"The great big post about my great big cover for ‘Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom’"},"content":{"rendered":"\"Front\n\n

If you were following along a couple of months ago, you probably know that at that time I was working on the dust jacket art for my book Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom<\/em>.<\/p>\n

I couldn’t show it to you back then. That’s because the auspicious moment for a cover reveal is determined during ancient, eldritch rituals around the smoking braziers and in between the ragged and unsettling tapestries of the towers that brood over the isle of Manhattan.
\n<\/p>\n

Yeah, that’s really how they do it. They’re old school, over there.<\/p>\n

But last week my editor showed off the front cover and wraparound versions of the dust jacket. So here it is – front cover above, and the whole dust jacket below.<\/p>\n\n \"Dust\n <\/a>\n

The Old Cover<\/h3>\n

If you’ve been following along even longer <\/em>you may remember that I did a cover design for the book, back before it even was a book. It looked like this:<\/p>\n\"Original\n

I really liked the vintage paperback palette and the detail of Rusty hanging on to the rocket in a kind of homage to Josh Kirby’s Discworld <\/em>covers. But I also figured that if a publisher wanted the book, some other artist would end up doing the cover… because cover art is another matter that’s decided during those archaic festivities that I mentioned above.<\/p>\n

So I was happy to learn that even though Tor didn’t want my original cover, they did<\/em> want me to do a new one.<\/p>\n

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The New Cover<\/h3>\n

\n\"Back<\/a><\/p> 

In March I got a rough description of the cover they <\/em>wanted, and that’s more or less what you see on the front.<\/p>\n

But because it was to be a wraparound jacket I had all sorts of room to show the rest of what they wanted, which was the city of Retropolis; and I took advantage of the situation by doing on the back cover what I really wanted to do: a whirlwind of characters in another light homage to Josh Kirby.<\/p>\n

Because nothing says ‘humor’ better than a crowd of frightened people who are running for their lives.<\/p>\n

But, hey, I’m getting ahead of myself.<\/p>\n

The Roughs<\/h3>\n

First I worked up a series of roughs: there were six of them. Like most of what I do, these roughs started in 3DS Max and were finished (rather lightly, for the roughs) in Photoshop. They were very, very preliminary.<\/p>\n

For complicated reasons it seemed like it would be better to offer fewer choices than that, so I cut it down to two. Of those two they picked the rough that I liked best. You can see that one below.<\/p>\n

And although I didn’t realize it at the time, that rough is the cover you see now at Amazon, and at Barnes & Noble, and everyplace else where the book’s mentioned. Now that the cover’s been revealed we should eventually see the real cover show up in all those places. I’m eager to see that happen.<\/p>\"Rough\n

The Layers<\/h3>\n

At the rough stage I still had no idea what my polygon count would be in 3DS Max. (Over seven million!) But it was obvious that I’d need to handle the scene in multiple layers. In the end, there were at least six of these layers. (It’s hard to be exact, because there were problems that showed up only when I’d rendered the scene at a high resolution – so I went back, near the end, to render out my fixes for those.) At the very<\/em> end I put all the layers together in Photoshop, where I did all kinds of retouching on them until they were a picture.<\/p>\n

The biggest single task was the city in the background. For the rough I’d just pasted in bits and pieces of my existing city backdrops to get the building masses about where I wanted them. For the final I had to model new buildings and arrange them all into a layout that made sense. So of the six weeks I spent on the picture, I spent two in the city.<\/p>\n

Lighting is always a large task, and here I was lighting about six separate scenes that needed to match. I know this sounds simple: but this isn’t photography. I’m not documenting. The lighting all had to look<\/em> correct, but in fact it’s subverted and bent in countless ways that better serve the picture.<\/p>\n

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