Voiceteam roundup part art
Since there´s still a couple of the round three works I contributed to that haven't been made public I figured I could make a cover art round up today. I ended up making a lot of cover art for other people's podfics and turns out I really enjoy it! I have learned so many new things in photopea, it's been great. I'll try to go in chronological order from first to last. Here goes!
I (as always) began very ambitiously (is it even a bite if it doesn't look like more than you can chew?) with this coverart:
It was quite a bit of work isolating all the hats from their background and covering the musicians on the stage in a way that looked natural by copying other parts of the background. This was also before I found out you could make a border around text in photopea so that was done by putting the same words in a slightly bigger font behind the other words and fiddling and cursing until it looked decent, I do think it's a nice effect.
This story is so beautiful. It's a moment between Max and Robin right after Starcourt where they sit and talk on the edge of an ambulance. I really wanted to show their backs, but I couldn't find any good screengrabs that would fit, so I went with this idea of the silhouettes. The robin one is actually taken from the bathroom scene and I can't remember where the Max one is taken from, just that I made sure she had the two braids in it like she has in the final Starcourt scene. I had to do so much fiddling to get their silhouettes properly shaped, because both of them had complicated backgrounds that photopea wanted to lump in with them. That is also part of why there's the slight glow around them, it softened the edges and made them more forgiving. This is probably the cover art I've ever made I am the most proud of.
I had so many ideas for this one. I'm pretty glad I ended up going with this one though. The neon lettering was harder to get to work than expected, I spent ages fiddling with that, and then making the poster fit in more with the picture and not feel stamped on took a bit too. I was really glad to find that background on pixabay since it really helped making the edges of Eddie's hair not stand out so much (that hair is a nightmare to remove background for). This one feels like a study in crucial details that no one would know that I spent so much time on, but would stand out if I hadn't spent that time.
Speaking of things I had a hundred ideas for. This one is actually the one where I worked on the most separate ideas. I think I had four beginnings on drafts that all looked wildly different plus an idea that never saw light of day because I am still suffering from the lenovo AAAA prank.
See, the thing is there is this bouquet of flowers that is absolutely central to this story and also extremely well described, so I at first wanted to include that on the cover or at least something resembling it. As it turns out when wondering the free-to-use pictures on the net that might not be as easy as that and even finding a bouquet with just about the right colourscheme turned out to be hard, and so did tuning the hues of a bouquet nicely.
In the end what decided it most of all was also having to include so many names and that I really fell in love with this specific flower mentioned in the fic.
Making the coverart for this one was mostly about learning how to manipulate the shape of text and exploring the many different colours of fire until I found the right one to pick for the text. (It's a Dutch translation of a Good Omens fic for those of you wondering)
This one, for me, ended up being an exploration in remembering what my grandma's videotapes used to look like, and yet not at all being able to find a good base image for making a more film-like tape case before going with this simple option. I do kinda enjoy making covers that seem like real things that could exist.
Aaaand last, but not least:
This one caused me trouble. Mostly because my ideas where too hard to execute and also because it's a very short fic that doesn't give many visuals. All the others are rooted in some visual from the fic, but this one is a conversation on parenting that doesn't include many visuals that I felt like vibed with the fic as a whole. So I ended up grabbing onto the fatherly aspect of it all.
This photo originally had a black background, but I felt like that would clash with the vibes, so I decided to change that, then cursed a bunch when I found out that was easier said than done, did a bunch of things that felt illegal and arrived at this little thing.
Thus ended my voiceteam cover art journey. I have really taken a liking to doing this, which maybe shouldn't have taken me by surprise since I also love illustrating songs. There's something about having text and a story and a picture all mixing together that I really enjoy. I plan to make many more, I kinda had a day where I was just itching to make some, two days after the regular rounds of voiceteam ended, but I didn't want to take any points from tie-break participants. We will see what the future brings.
