Solipsistic Meanderings » Images of the imagination

January 6, 2006

Images of the imagination

As I’ve mentioned so many times over here in the past couple of weeks, I am obsessed with art at the moment :p It’s not that I believe I can do a better job than a professional artist when it comes to a cover. In fact, I prefer the professional artist who does my covers to work on their own and come up with their own vision because I like to see what images (or imagery :p) people get from reading my writing.

However, I have a vision in my head for what I’d do with the cover if I had the artistic talent and I would like to make that vision a reality just to see how well the reality stands up against the vision 🙂 Besides, I’m a tech-junkie and I just like to tinker with stuff :p So, I’ve been working towards making the cover in my mind a reality. Of course, the first thing was finding the right tools for the job. I had intended to use PhotoShop at first because I’m most familiar with it and use it on and off for various graphic related jobs. However, as I considered what I wanted to do, it became evident that I wasn’t good enough of an artist to do the job in PhotoShop :p So, I turned to Bryce since it allows you to build a scene using 3D building blocks much more easily.

The snag was that I’d never used Bryce before :p But this is where I say that the Net is a wonderful tool once again. I found a set of excellent set of Bryce tutorials online. They are totally free but the quality of the tutorials are worth more than the $20 the author says that they charge for the actual 6 week course! I’ve been working my way through the tutorials bit by bit everyday whenever I have a moment. I do some stuff in the morning and then a bit more in the evening after work. So far, I’m only up to lesson two and have managed to make a toy wagon :p The little image shows how the final output looked though the actual output was honking big 3MB file :p

I’m happy with the progress I’m making though and am hoping that I’d know enough soon to start setting up the basic scene for the cover I have in my mind. Boy, it sure looks much easier when they do it in the movies :p