To start with, I followed the same steps as I did last week,
using a black background and importing the background art by Roberto Pirola at
Dreamstime, as well as creating the title using white letters in Segoe Print
Bold, and the byline using white letters in Tiger Rag LET.
After that, I had to decide on what I wanted to add, and,
this time, I decided it was eyes. It took me a while to work my way through the
Dreamstime stock images, before I decided to purchase a lovely set of beasteyes by Plus69. The only problem I had was that the image was a long, narrow
band, and not at all book cover shaped, so I knew I would have to isolate the
eyes and position them closer together to get them to fit on the page.
As I worked in GIMP, I discovered I couldn’t isolate both
eyes in the same image. That is, I couldn’t cut around one eye, and then
isolate and cut out the other, so that they were on different layers, with the
background on a third. This meant I had to save the image twice under different
names (left eye, and right eye, worked fine), and go through the process of
shrinking the image so that no one side was longer than 525 px, before cutting
out one eye, returning it to the image as a separate layer, and then making the
background disappear, and returning the image to its original dimensions and
saving it again.
Once I had the eyes, I opened them as layers in the cover
document, and then used the move tool to position them, and the erase tool to finalise the shape, and to blur the hard edges of the isolation. I also adjusted the opacity of the eye images to that the planet background could be partially seen through them.
The final step was to use the ‘Brighten-Contrast’ button on
the ‘Colors’ tab drop-down to give things a bit more definition and darken up the background so that the white lettering was easier to read.
And this cover was complete - again with many thinks to GIMP, and the artists at Dreamstime.
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