<- Click hereI suppose many of you know of the Red Bubble forum? I'm fascinated by the talent of many of its participants, I'm finding them both instructive and VERY challenging. They accept all sorts of art including short stories, poems, and other fiction. One of the groups, WMG - The Writer's Market Group is bringing out an annual "Best Of" E-Book and this year they will apparently combine submissions from 2008 which shared "Epic" as a theme.
To that end, they challenged group members to submit entries into a contest to design a cover. Now since it is an eBook I decided to break with the convention of a horizontal book format (so far I'm alone in entries which have done that). Of course all of the text on the cover can/will be eventually tailored to the forum's specific needs. However it seems to me that a graphic which screams EPIC needs to have some pretty common elements, right?
(1) VAST... It's gotta be BIG... HUMONGUS... SWEEPING! Hence the panorama format.
(2) Sexy... Gotta imply all sorts of moist liaisons which of course demands a blonde... Obvious, hun?
(3) Weird, scary, sinister villains.
(4) A mysterious object.
(5) A palette that oozes something spooky either reds or yellow-greens, or cold-cold blues.
(6) Suggestions of edgy texture? Gritty.
(7) Action.
Now I probably should have had armies massed in the background along with booming cannons, lots of smoke, and squirming bodies. But, lacking any squirming bodies ... well y'gives it what y'gots. Right?
Wuddaya think.... does it screech "EPIC!!!!"
Hope so, if you're Red Bubble members... please vote for the sucker. K?
OOOPS!!!
Okay.... I should read the rules. Seems that the dimensions had to be A4 size.... Sigh.... I still think that the pano screeeeechs out EPIC!!! But if it has to be book cover size... well, hey.... I can do dat.... Which do you prefer? Choices?
10 comments:
I'm always amazed by how much time you still find, exploring community after community :)
Cool, though I don't get the slogan. Who's she? What's this thing about erasing memories? There is also the combination of typefeces. I'd try to combine the EPIC logo with some sans serif text. For me there is too much of a SciFi element to get away with serifs. Logo and background images are perfect.
Thanks Andreas. A couple of points. First as for the type faces there are only two... the one for epic and the others are all Arial... Which seems to be the default font for previous Blogzine covers. As I recall, Arial is sans serif, right? But.... $%$%# I did not use Arial I used Minion for no %$$%^! reason. AAAARGH! Details will kill us all. FOOOIE.
Okay... I have fixed that on the revised cover. Thanks a lot for noting that. As you can see, I've also changed the teaser line. The original one referred to the blonde. Now, you may ask, "Why the blonde? Who's the blonde?" This is an epic. There is ALWAYS a blonde. Right?
Hope the changed text reduces the Sci-Fi feel... What I should have probably built in were soldiers on horseback. Now that's epic, eh?
Oh yes, I like that!
I liked the fist much better than the book size. You left out the nudity epic have to have nudity at least parcel.
nice job as always ted
Both of these are amazing and I do prefer the sense of scale in the first but rules are rules right? In the second, by scaling down the word "Epic" I feel you've lost some of the punch that was present in the original. Given the 'shape ' of the negative space, adding some sort of perspective effect to the title might be interesting, or is that too much of a cliche for this type of thing? Anyway, that's my take on your brilliant compositions.
Hiya everybody....
Thanks for the suggestions Andreas.
Ted... they said the thing had to be family rated, which sort of lowers the nudity bar, eh... Grumble...
Odd thing Bill, The word Epic is the same on both images. In fact none of the parts were rescaled.. least I don't think so... Wait... I did change the relative size of the background tanks. I think the sun's relatively the same. But you're right, there's an optical perception that the relative sizes changed. Go figger.... eh?
The voting's going on at Red Bubble's Writer's Market Group for the winner of this challenge, and it looks as if I'm getting some votes, but I think I'm trailing another entry. It's white knuckle time.
Still doing wonderful work here I see...
This is really cool. This kind of thing is right up your alley.
Stacey and Michael... luvvit when you drop by. As for the challenge... I LOST! LOST???? Grumble....
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