I am a creative person. I’ve always had creative impulses, and I continually tinker with my creations (You may not have noticed every change to my site, but I do minor tweaks to it every week, and major thematic redesigns every 18-24 months. The current design is just over 12 months old).

I’ve mentioned this elsewhere, but I’ve been creating, modifying, and playing with digital imagery since before Photoshop was born (starting with Aldus Pagemaker and Freehand, then Adobe Illustrator and LetraSet’s LetraStudio. Eventually I moved on to Corel Painter and Photoshop).

But I’m not a visual artist.

I can manipulate existing work but generating art, objects, etc from scratch is not my strength and my output tends to be crap (and I won’t use AI). So I tend to work from either stock photography or photos from my own extensive, mostly unpublished catalogue (I’ve lived on three continents and travelled extensively on those and two more. I have thousands of photos ranging in quality from ‘WTF is that?’ to ‘Aw, beauty!”).

Creatives I respect always talk about A/B testing in design, but I’ve yet to have the budget or audience to try that. So I put a cover out there, and I wait. If it gets attention, I keep it. Otherwise, I iterate.

Here’s a few examples I’m going to go through

Space Opera

This one was originally inspired by the Hugo Award rocket. I drew the right side, got it looking good, then duplicated, flipped and merged to make the complete rocket, which i loving ly call “Hugo”. As I started releasing other collections, and branding became a concern, I moved from red to gold text, and less text on the cover. Hugo got a dark makeover with some textures and lighting. Also, I’d made a background from an old star map and some specks floating in water. Various gradients and lens flare experiments had lead to a background that I was replicating on all my space opera stories. in the most recent iteration, only the background is still present. Hugo got repurposed for another cover. But i might actually revert to the second cover here and there.

Read on!

Sylvester, Down

Long ago, I’d made this wedge-shaped ship and put it on fire. It’s appeared in many places, but mainly in the first two iterations of Sylvester Down (and now in Zeus, Beheld.) That last version of the cover is Hugo, overlaid on himself and warped to make it look like there’s a yacht-shaped ship being fired upon. This is the other one that I might revert to the second cover instead.

The Maiden Voyage of Novyy Mir

So it needs to be said that the titular ship, Novyy Mir, is the rechristened International Space Station. So, yes that is the ISS on the cover, and yes, it makes sense once you know the context. Also in both iterations, that is the moon. The more recent version has more movement, due to layered blurs and has acquired my (patented?) star field with added lens flare (I feel like JJ Abrams!) but without the overlaid star map. I’ve also purchased a decent font.

One last note:

Here’s Zeus Beheld, to show you my burning wedge-ship. Enjoy