Miira – book 1 sneak peek

Okay. Finally an image I’m happy with. The bit on the right will be the front cover. The bit on the left the back cover. And the odd, transitional bit in the middle will become the spine. I don’t have exact measurements for the spine yet, but I can adjust the dimensions quite easily as the spine is made up of 2 separate vector images:

To give you some idea of how complicated this process was, here’s the same image broken down into its component parts. This first one is the background image:

On top of that sits a composite image made up of a vectored, coloured background:

and a vectored foreground:

The original of this foreground was used in the graphics I created for Innerscape Episodes 1 – 5. For the print version cover, however, I had to clean it up completely by ‘trimming’ out every wire…manually. Now, I can change the coloured background to anything I want and it will show through. Both the foreground and background images were a huge amount of work, but worth it in the end…I hope.

Then on top of these images sits another composite image. This is the portrait of Miira which is made up of a gilt frame [which had to be cut out and altered to fit the middle of the circuit board:

and this glorious picture I found on http://www.freeimages.com:

 

The final touch was to add a suggestion of depth:

The outline rectangles are a very slight shade lighter than the pure black of the background. From a distance, they create an optical illusion which makes the face appear as if it’s set back inside the frame:

I still have the lettering of the Title etc to do, and that’ll be another learning curve, but for now I’d really love to know what you guys think. Oh, and the title will be ‘Miira’, but I’m still tossing up between ‘Miira, book 1 of Innerscape’ or ‘Miira, Episodes 1 and 2 of Innerscape’. Anyway, I’ve got a full day’s work today so I’d better get to it. 🙂

cheers

Meeks