Image
  • Writing
    • Andy Gavin: Author
    • About my Novels & Writing
    • All Writing Posts
    • The Darkening Dream
      • Buy the Book Online
      • Sample Chapters
      • Reviews
      • Info for Reviewers
      • Press Coverage
      • Awards
      • Cast of Characters
    • Untimed
      • Buy Untimed Online
      • Book Trailer
      • Sample Chapters
      • Reviews
      • Info for Reviewers
      • Press Coverage
      • Awards
      • Cast of Characters
    • Scrivener – Writer’s Word Processor
    • iPad for Writers
    • Naughty Dark Contest
  • Books
    • Book Review Index
    • Favorite Fantasy Novels
    • Andy Gavin: Author
    • The Darkening Dream
      • Buy the Book Online
      • Sample Chapters
      • Short Story: Harvard Divinity
      • Reviews
      • Info for Reviewers
      • Press Coverage
      • Awards
      • Cast of Characters
    • Untimed
      • About the Book
      • Buy Untimed Online
      • Book Trailer
      • Sample Chapters
      • Reviews
      • Info for Reviewers
      • Press Coverage
      • Awards
      • Cast of Characters
    • Naughty Dark Contest
  • Games
    • My Video Game Career
    • Post Archive by Series
    • All Games Posts Inline
    • Making Crash Bandicoot
    • Crash 15th Anniversary Memories
    • World of Warcraft Endgames
    • Getting a Job Designing Video Games
    • Getting a Job Programming Video Games
    • Naughty Dark Contest
  • Movies
    • Movie Review Index
  • Television
    • TV Review Index
    • Buffy the Vampire Slayer
    • A Game of Thrones
  • Food
    • Food Review Index
    • Foodie Club
    • Hedonists
    • LA Sushi Index
    • Chinese Food Index
    • LA Peking Duck Guide
    • Eating Italy
    • Eating France
    • Eating Spain
    • Eating Türkiye
    • Eating Dutch
    • Eating Croatia
    • Eating Vietnam
    • Eating Australia
    • Eating Israel
    • Ultimate Pizza
    • ThanksGavin
    • Margarita Mix
    • Foodie Photography
    • Burgundy Vintage Chart
  • Other
    • All Posts, Magazine Style
    • Archive of all Posts
    • Fiction
    • Technology
    • History
    • Anything Else
  • Gallery
  • Bio
  • About
    • About me
    • About my Writing
    • About my Video Games
    • Ask Me Anything
  • Contact

Archive for Photoshop

Making of a Cover

Dec19

On Sunday we shot the live model for my new cover for The Darkening Dream.


The artist, the amazing Cliff Nielsen, works out of a 1903 former power station! This was totally awesome given the 1913 setting of The Darkening Dream.


The interior is even crazier!


And our studio location where Cliff has set up his stage area and lighting.


The artist behind his camera. Turns out he’s a Canon 5D Mark II shooter as well!

Enter our lovely young protagonist, Sarah Engelmann, played by the talented Dana Melanie.


It just takes a bit of costume and some hair styling to take her back a hundred years! This cover is a bit allegorical. In the book, Sarah is plagued by dreams of violent super natural deaths, and entangled with more than a bit of the violent supernatural during her waking moments.


So for the cover we are trying to capture a bit of a nighttime Sarah caught in the junction between these waking (natural) and sleeping (supernatural) worlds. Just a note for total verisimilitude, Cliff will have to Photoshop off the nail polish (like 2 minutes work) because Western women didn’t wear nail polish between late antiquity and the 1930s! (Although the Chinese did)


Cliff earning his keep.


He shot using the 24-70 2.8L which is a great lens for studio work.


Hair fix.


I thought this shot during break an amusing contrast of period and modern.


Dana was a fantastic sport and even put up with a second — and creepy — crucifixion pose. In the context of The Darkening Dream this isn’t really Jesus type crucifixion, but more Conan on the Tree of Woe or Odin sacrificed and hung from the world tree Yggdrasil. Rest assured, it has certain magical/occult significance in the story.


Cliff had to shoot from high up on a ladder.


During this part of the shoot it was suggested that I draw in a small dark mustache and cultivate a sinister silent movie villain laugh.


Or perhaps it’s the reverse.

All in all, it was a fantastic shoot and we got great images. I can’t wait to see the finished cover in a couple of days.

Read more about The Darkening Dream here.
Or check out the cover design here.
Or read the first two chapters for free.

Related posts:

  1. Cover Commission
  2. The New Cover Concept
  3. The edits are all in!
  4. Untimed – The Second Cover
  5. Making Crash Bandicoot – part 4
By: agavin
Comments (4)
Posted in: Darkening Dream
Tagged as: Andy Gavin, Book Cover, Canon EOS 5D Mark II, Cliff Nielsen, Cosmetics, Cover art, Dana, Nail polish, Photoshop, Sarah, The Darkening Dream

Developing a Look

Nov29

I’m very busy right now with different stages of both my novels. I’m line editing Untimed and trying to get my first, The Darkening Dream, ready for publication. One of the more fun parts of this is the art design. The book has seven points of view and each chapter is written from one perspectives. To help subliminally differentiate them, I thought it would be cool to commission chapter heading engravings specific to each character.

The book is set in 1913 and packed with occult workings based on extensive research into real religious, pseudo-religious, and just plain magical belief systems. By real, I mean that people before 1913 believed and wrote about them. But in the book, they’re really real. This is a world consistant with ours, but where the creepy sordid and supernatural crawls just beneath the surface. And truth is stranger than fiction.

Given that the images needed to be black and white, I thought a style reminiscent of classical occult engravings of the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries would be perfect. Iconography of demons, witches, and magic from creators who actually believed in them!

Below are historical engravings I dug up (google for the win!). I provided them to my artist to illustrate the mood and style I wanted for my original pieces.












The above examples are for STYLE, not for content. I like to think of these as reflecting the “occult engraving” style I want to emulate. They are engraved with a naive sensibility, hatched shading, awkward proportions, and western occult symbolic motifs. As a stickler for detail, I must confess that some of the above images are actually nineteenth century, such as the demon Baphomet (the goat headed one with one arm up and one arm down). Although these are cool I decided to target my style to the older wood block type (these later ones are probably copper plate) as the nineteenth century artist probably crafted the images more out of a sense of exotic and less out of true belief like the earlier more hysterical age that was prone to burning at the stake.

Unless you’re lucky enough to work with an artist who is willing to immerse themselves in your book and related materials, it’s essential to provide a clear direction, usually illustrated with a group images hinting at the style you want. Without reading your book and knowing as much as you do (fat chance) it’s unlikely that they are going to spontaneously generate a style that is consistent with the feel of your work. In future posts, I’ll show the examples I used to art direct my specific character images, and the results these produced.

Find out more about the writing of The Darkening Dream here.
Or specific articles on the look for: al-Nasir or Parris.

By: agavin
Comments (10)
Posted in: Darkening Dream
Tagged as: Adobe Photoshop, Andy Gavin, Arts, Baphomet, Engraving, Esoteric and Occult, graphics, Icon, Image Editing, Interior book layout, Occult, Photoshop, Religion and Spirituality, The Darkening Dream, Visual Design, Visual effects

Cover Commission

Nov15

Cliff painted this gorgeous cover to steampunk novel: The Map of Time

I’ve officially signed a cover artist for The Darkening Dream. His name is Cliff Nielsen and he’s a very experienced artist using a cool ethereal multimedia style. You can check out his work on his website but  I pasted two into this post. I originally found him though this image of the dude with the watch. I was searching the web for “clockwork men” since the villains in my second novel, Untimed, are… you guessed it… clockwork men. Google brought up this image and I had to find out who the artist was. Then I discovered I already owned a decent collection of books he drew the covers for (e.g. City of Bones, which I reviewed recently).

My homebrew TDD cover

A lot of covers these days are just simple photos (like my homebrew tree cover below) or stenciled vector art. But I’ve always been partial to “painted” covers, so in researching cover design options I kept coming back to commissioning an original illustration. Perhaps it’s because of my early years as a 70s and 80s Science Fiction and Fantasy reader, where nearly every cover was painted. Back then, photographic covers were always a sign of some cheesy film tie-in.

In any case, Cliff’s art resonated well with my own style. Although it must be noted that the above clockwork man is far too 19th century for the mysterious “Tick-Tocks” in my second book (who blend their outfits into whatever era they visit), but it’s still a great image and very evocative.

Another Cliff cover: The Thief and the Beanstalk

_

So Cliff is reading/skimming the book and I hope to have some content sketches back shortly. I can’t wait. One of the best things about working with artists (and I was fortunate to have worked with dozens of great ones at Naughty Dog and my other companies) is seeing your ideas realized in a visual form.

For an interview with Cliff, and a photo, see here.
For more information on The Darkening Dream.
For more posts on writing, click here.

Related posts:

  1. Untimed – The Second Cover
By: agavin
Comments (8)
Posted in: Darkening Dream
Tagged as: Art, Book Cover, Cliff Nielsen, Cover art, Illustration, Illustrators, Photoshop, Science Fiction, Science Fiction and Fantasy, The Darkening Dream, Visual Arts
Watch the Trailer or

Buy it Online!

Buy it Online!

96 of 100 tickets!

Find Andy at:

Follow Me on Pinterest

Subscribe by email:

More posts on:



Complete Archives

Categories

  • Contests (7)
  • Fiction (404)
    • Books (113)
    • Movies (77)
    • Television (123)
    • Writing (115)
      • Darkening Dream (62)
      • Untimed (37)
  • Food (1,765)
  • Games (101)
  • History (13)
  • Technology (21)
  • Uncategorized (16)

Recent Posts

  • Happy Hibi
  • Eating Naples – Palazzo Petrucci
  • Eating San Foca – Aura
  • Eating Otranto – ArborVitae
  • Eating Lecce – Gimmi
  • Eating Lecce – Varius
  • Eating Lecce – Duo
  • Eating Lecce – Doppiozero
  • Eating Torre Canne – Autentico
  • Eating Torre Canne – Beach

Favorite Posts

  • I, Author
  • My Novels
  • The Darkening Dream
  • Sample Chapters
  • Untimed
  • Making Crash Bandicoot
  • My Gaming Career
  • Getting a job designing video games
  • Getting a job programming video games
  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer
  • A Game of Thrones
  • 27 Courses of Truffles
  • Ultimate Pizza
  • Eating Italy
  • LA Sushi
  • Foodie Club

Archives

  • May 2025 (4)
  • April 2025 (4)
  • February 2025 (5)
  • January 2025 (3)
  • December 2024 (13)
  • November 2024 (14)
  • October 2024 (14)
  • September 2024 (15)
  • August 2024 (13)
  • July 2024 (15)
  • June 2024 (14)
  • May 2024 (15)
  • April 2024 (13)
  • March 2024 (9)
  • February 2024 (7)
  • January 2024 (9)
  • December 2023 (8)
  • November 2023 (14)
  • October 2023 (13)
  • September 2023 (9)
  • August 2023 (15)
  • July 2023 (13)
  • June 2023 (14)
  • May 2023 (15)
  • April 2023 (14)
  • March 2023 (12)
  • February 2023 (11)
  • January 2023 (14)
  • December 2022 (11)
  • November 2022 (13)
  • October 2022 (14)
  • September 2022 (14)
  • August 2022 (12)
  • July 2022 (9)
  • June 2022 (6)
  • May 2022 (8)
  • April 2022 (5)
  • March 2022 (4)
  • February 2022 (2)
  • January 2022 (8)
  • December 2021 (6)
  • November 2021 (6)
  • October 2021 (8)
  • September 2021 (4)
  • August 2021 (5)
  • July 2021 (2)
  • June 2021 (3)
  • January 2021 (1)
  • December 2020 (1)
  • September 2020 (1)
  • August 2020 (1)
  • April 2020 (11)
  • March 2020 (15)
  • February 2020 (13)
  • January 2020 (14)
  • December 2019 (13)
  • November 2019 (12)
  • October 2019 (14)
  • September 2019 (14)
  • August 2019 (13)
  • July 2019 (13)
  • June 2019 (14)
  • May 2019 (13)
  • April 2019 (10)
  • March 2019 (10)
  • February 2019 (11)
  • January 2019 (13)
  • December 2018 (14)
  • November 2018 (11)
  • October 2018 (15)
  • September 2018 (15)
  • August 2018 (15)
  • July 2018 (11)
  • June 2018 (14)
  • May 2018 (13)
  • April 2018 (13)
  • March 2018 (17)
  • February 2018 (12)
  • January 2018 (15)
  • December 2017 (15)
  • November 2017 (13)
  • October 2017 (16)
  • September 2017 (16)
  • August 2017 (16)
  • July 2017 (11)
  • June 2017 (13)
  • May 2017 (6)
  • March 2017 (3)
  • February 2017 (4)
  • January 2017 (7)
  • December 2016 (14)
  • November 2016 (11)
  • October 2016 (11)
  • September 2016 (12)
  • August 2016 (15)
  • July 2016 (13)
  • June 2016 (13)
  • May 2016 (13)
  • April 2016 (12)
  • March 2016 (13)
  • February 2016 (12)
  • January 2016 (13)
  • December 2015 (14)
  • November 2015 (14)
  • October 2015 (13)
  • September 2015 (13)
  • August 2015 (18)
  • July 2015 (16)
  • June 2015 (13)
  • May 2015 (13)
  • April 2015 (14)
  • March 2015 (15)
  • February 2015 (13)
  • January 2015 (13)
  • December 2014 (14)
  • November 2014 (13)
  • October 2014 (13)
  • September 2014 (12)
  • August 2014 (15)
  • July 2014 (13)
  • June 2014 (13)
  • May 2014 (14)
  • April 2014 (14)
  • March 2014 (10)
  • February 2014 (11)
  • January 2014 (13)
  • December 2013 (14)
  • November 2013 (13)
  • October 2013 (14)
  • September 2013 (12)
  • August 2013 (14)
  • July 2013 (10)
  • June 2013 (14)
  • May 2013 (14)
  • April 2013 (14)
  • March 2013 (15)
  • February 2013 (14)
  • January 2013 (13)
  • December 2012 (14)
  • November 2012 (16)
  • October 2012 (13)
  • September 2012 (14)
  • August 2012 (16)
  • July 2012 (12)
  • June 2012 (16)
  • May 2012 (21)
  • April 2012 (18)
  • March 2012 (20)
  • February 2012 (23)
  • January 2012 (31)
  • December 2011 (35)
  • November 2011 (33)
  • October 2011 (32)
  • September 2011 (29)
  • August 2011 (35)
  • July 2011 (33)
  • June 2011 (25)
  • May 2011 (31)
  • April 2011 (30)
  • March 2011 (34)
  • February 2011 (31)
  • January 2011 (33)
  • December 2010 (33)
  • November 2010 (39)
  • October 2010 (26)
All Things Andy Gavin
Copyright © 2025 All Rights Reserved
Programmed by Andy Gavin