Book Cover

 

For my book-cover assignment, there was really only one choice in my mind: Dune. Dune is unequivocally my favorite science fiction book, and science fiction is one of my favorite genres to read. I’ve personally read Dune a half dozen times, and it never ceases to deliver. Over the years, Dune has had some pretty awful book covers (the best being its current cover), and I wanted to take a shot at doing my own version.

A small back story on Dune: its set on a desert-planet, one of its central plot-points is centered around huge sandworms that live on the planet and the indigenous people of the planet who brave the harshness of the desert. Any further information can be found by reading this awesome masterpiece, or by doing a Google search for ‘Frank Herbert Dune,’ though I recommend the former.

Here is how I went about constructing this piece. I first sought out an adequate representation of a sandworm, which is the iconic image most associated with this novel. My husband plays a game called Magic the Gathering (http://www.dailymtg.com), and several of the cards in this game feature artwork of creatures the game refers to as wurms. Many of the wurms on these cards look like they could be from this novel, except most wurms depicted are done so in hues of red and green, which don’t really call to mind a sand-dwelling one. The one card that did manage to pull this off is titled Reckless Wurm. The image I used for my book cover came from themagicland.com (http://themagicland.com/img/1743.jpg). I took this wurm, expertly illustrated/painted by Greg Staples, and brought it into Photoshop, where I carefully used an airbrush setting on the eraser to erase the background of the wurm card, so just the wurm itself was left.

Next, I searched around on the internet for pictures of sand dunes, until I came across travleblog.org, and found some real dune wall papers: http://www.travelblog.org/Wallpaper/sand_dunes_mui_ne.html. I snagged the one used from there, and used the smart object-filter technique shown on page 323 in our Photoshop cs5 book with the charcoal filter on a duplicate layer of the dune. I changed opacity to 62%, and I did this to give the sand dune a more ‘illustrated’ feel, to match the sandworm represented by the reckless wurm. I placed the sandworm on the dune, and used a ‘splatter’ preset brush with a brown and an orange tone, to make it look like the sandworm was kicking up sand, or bursting through the sand’s surface—which is what they do in the book. I then made sure to make the foremost portion of the sand dune not have any of the splatter-brush effect on it, as the worm is supposed to be far away. I added a small, 40% opacity outer glow to the sandworm, which picked up tiny pixels I missed when using the eraser tool, to round out the sand-bursting effect.

Then I did the sky. Using combinations of the burn tool and dodge tool and supplemented by the smudge tool, I managed to obtain the sky’s blue effect. I then went to an amazing photo reference site/archive, powered by NASA, which is http://nix.nasa.gov/; From NASA:” Not a collection in itself, the NASA Image Exchange is a search engine that pulls images from across NASA's Web space.” -- That site can search all of NASA’s pages for images on a subject, which I used to find this awesome Earth-moon picture: http://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/sseop/images/ESC/small/ISS020/ISS020-E-17867.JPG. I grabbed that moon and placed it on my book cover, but duplicated the layer and then used ‘scale’ to scale them differently. For the big moon, I used the filter technique from pg 323 again, but used bas-relief as the filter instead. For the two smaller ones, I used hue/saturation and changed the hue of the moon to green and red respectively, to drive home the science fiction factor. I gave all three of these lawyers an outer glow effect.

To get the small figure, the main character Paul Muad’dib Atreides, I actually did a search for ‘fremen’ the book’s term for the desert people, and was lead to the Wikipedia article on Dune Sandworms (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandworm_%28Dune%29) which lead me to the image: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:DuneTV-Paul%2BHooks.jpg. This is Paul Atreides from the Sci-Fi Channel’s 2000 miniseries version of the book. I used the same erasing technique I used on the Reckless Wurm card image, but made the hooks in his hand (maker-hooks from the book) a brighter brown. I then shrunk him using scale. I then applied a filter of ‘paint squares’ over top of him to give him a more ‘illustrated’ feel, and then zoomed in and used a 1 pixel pencil brush to dot his eyes with a vibrant blue, (which is another book-plot point, intrigued yet? You should really read this book if you haven’t) and gave him a very subtle, low opacity drop shadow.

I decided early on I wanted the title below the image of the worm bursting from the dunes under the three moon sky of a science fiction planet. If you see the title Dune, you may just run for the hills if you have no idea it is about epic sandworms and so forth. I wanted to capture the audience’s attention and then have the image lead the eye down to the title. I found an appropriate font, for free, under ‘science fiction’ @ www.dafont.com; it’s called Terminator. I used the layer FX stroke, to outline the Book title and author. I accomplished the book cover border by using selectionàmodifyàborder and then using fill.

Overall I think it captures the feel of the novel rather well and really like how it turned out.