195: Creativity Drive - Day Two

CAUTION: Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.


Day two of self-imposed graphical creativity.
Let's not bury the lead, this is why you're here...


Click for a bigger version (1000*1415px, 352kb). Opens in a new window.

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...the hell?

I had the idea over a year ago watching an episode of ITV's Poirot, Murder in Mesopotamia if I remember correctly. My favourite episodes of Poirot seem to take place in a desert environment. It struck me that the same is true of the Indiana Jones series. I love them all, but it just seems at home in the sand. Since MiM opens at an archaeological digging site, the obvious (yet previously elusive) question hit me... 'who else is kicking around in Egypt in the early part of the 1930's?

Wouldn't this be the most awesome idea for a crossover project? As David Suchet is now concentrating purely on 'canon' Agatha Christie stories, and Harrison Ford is too old to recapture Raiders-era Indy, then I guess this remains in the realm of fan-fiction.

Now I'm doing a lot of writing this year, but I've yet to branch out to novels. But at the same time I'm too impatient to keep the project as an idea in my head. So I've got to visualise it somehow, right?

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Phase One

Creating the actual cover. I sourced some high(ish)-res pics of Mr Poirot and Mr Jones from the internet, then manually vectored over them in CorelDraw, converting them to three colours - the base/outline, the shadow section and the highlight section. The base is then trimmed out of an old paper texture and the cover background is a similar technique involving a Shphinx silhouette and a sand texture.

The title itself seems to be the only one that hasn't been used for an actual book, and the author is an amalgamation of George Lucas, Steven Spielberg and Agatha Christie. The typography reflects the historical period, and I've smashed the World of Blackout Skittlez version of me into the Penguin Books logo.

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Phase Two

Not content with making the cover of the book, I wanted to enter it into B3TA.com's 'Fake Ads' image challenge this week. So, I made a poster for it to sit on.

The cover is perspective'd onto a photo of a novel from my shelf, and dropshadowed onto a background I (once again) nicked via Google. The top 'Egypt 1934' tagline had been in my head for a few months since trying to figure out what the plot would be, and the 'twice the adventure' tag was more like something short'n'sweet to fill the gap (still pretty much works, though). A bit of promo-bumf at the bottom and some drawing pins in the corners, and we're ready for the final step...

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Phase Three

A quick jaunt over into Photoshop, and we dodge/burn the areas around the drawing pins, accent the outer edges in the same way, and apply a little texturing to make it look like it's been printed on actual paper.



Which brings us out at the pic you saw at the top of this post.
Somebody write this novel please, I really want to read it.

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More stuff tomorrow.
Thanks.



DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.

• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organizations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.