To start with, I haven't had access to any of the linked-in learning content because all of ESC's licenses have expired/been overextended, and I didn't realize I'd need to buy a subscription to something other than adobe creative cloud when I started the class, I thought these LinkedIn courses were optional. Quite frankly if I wanted to learn everything there is to know about implementing photoshop techniques from a third party educatory platform I could have paid the $124.95 LinkedIn membership fee for September through January and saved myself the extraneous and time-consuming classwork.
So I'll look for tutorials in these aspects on Youtube later. but for now, please know that I wasn't able to base my designs around any of them.
The first four sketches are for the novel "Outland" by Dennis E. Taylor, cover art by Nicole Opdenbosch.
Book Back Blurb: "Unwittingly perched on the brink of the endtimes, 6 college students create a gateway into a parallel universe that diverged from ours 70,000 years ago. In that world a premature explosion of the Yellowstone supervolcano either totally wiped out or severely thinned down the numbers of the human race, leaving all the Pleistocene species we extinguished still alive on the other side. Meanwhile, as our heroes test the machinery and adjust to the new world (Outland, as it becomes known), Yellowstone is experiencing record-breaking earthquakes, flash-heating, and increased Geyser activity in our universe, as if gearing up to blow, leaving no time for rigorous testing before just in time to make it the last real hope humanity has for survival."
These covers are all based around the idea of viewing part of the other world through the gate(s), relying on the common region principle to communicate the separation and stark contrast between the two universes. I stuck really close with highlighting the beauty of one world and desolation of another in these cover sketches, where the original cover only shows the devastation of one world and the promise of a better one, unseen, on the other side.
The second cover I played with was for Isaac Asimov's "Nemesis," cover art by Don Dixon.
Book Back Blurb: "In a world of many colonies spread throughout the solar system small habitat-ships of up to several hundred thousand form city-states in the space between planets and become increasingly ethnocentric, fearing contamination of culture, blood, and biome alike. After achieving reliable hyperspace travel and upon discovering a star only two lightyears from Earth, one such ethnocentric state chooses to abandon the solar system to seek out their own space where no other human tribes will venture. They make sure of this last point by never sharing the secret to hyperspace, never telling anyone about the new star (named Nemesis)--even though the details of its orientation suggest toward Earth in a course that would destroy all that there remained of human kind, and likely its solar system with it. Years later, as the Earth government fills pockets to get to figure out where the Nemesis colony went and how it went there, the daughter of Nemesis's discoverer finds herself drawn to the moon named Erythro, and whatever dangerous mysteries await her there."
These four covers are largely focused on the image of the newly found neighboring solar system--set up as a spaceship revolving around a moon, which revolves around a planet, which revolves (tidally locked) around a red dwarf star, using a prokaryote in many of the sketches. This was done because a major aspect of the book has to do with the trillions of simple single-celled organisms living on the moon, described as something prokaryotic encompassing the planet, which turn out merely to be the cells making up a sapient being that takes up the whole moon.
They also utilize the proximity principle and the similarity principle, grouping everything circular together as heavenly bodies for instance, with type of body indicated by size, and sorting those into the groups.
Finally, I redesigned the cover of the Arthur C. Clarke story "Rendezvous With Rama," cover art by Stanislaw Fernandes.
Book Back Blurb: "The existence of intelligent alien life is confirmed in the twenty-third century when a giant rotating cylinder comes streaming into the solar system, slowing as it heads vaguely in the direction of our sun. All readings from the ship indicate complete silence and stillness aboard, and all attempts at signal contact go unacknowledged, leaving the United Planets with only one option--to send their most qualified scientists and pilots to intercept and investigate the possibly dead, possibly derelict, possibly sleeping ship before it leaves our sight forever or takes hostile action against us."
These four sketches for "Rama" were difficult--the first feels far too simple, and the other three suffer from where my artistic skills and personal experience come up lacking--picturing the ground level of the world wrapped around the inside of a giant tube is a lot easier than drawing it, but I did my best to create the illusion. It might prove difficult to pull that one off in practice based on where my skills are at. I'd really want to go for the wow factor for this title, instill people with a sense of awe at the exploratory adventure about to be undertaken, especially considering its original cover art was so dull and tangentially related.
