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Friday 11 October 2013

How did I manage before I had a graphics tablet?

The gentle reader who has followed my blog will have seen the posts I've made about how I put together some of my covers here and here.  Well, I've moved more and more into cutting out and applying figures from Ackermann's prints into Ackermann's prints, and how I managed to do 'Friends and Fortunes' with a touch pad to hold down my cursor to put all those little sepia figures in, never mind Victor and Gilly is a matter that turned the air blue at times. 

So, now I have upgraded to Paintshop Pro 9, and a Wacom Bamboo graphics tablet which I thoroughly recommend. 
I had started work on the cover of 'None So Blind' which will be my next regency out, but with the tablet, I had the confidence to do a major repaint of both faces, as his was very low res, and hers was... well very red and very white.  Cleaning up the edges becomes a doddle too...




So here are the starting points!  The man and woman are both 1812, she's from Ackermann's and he's a French fashion plate which may account for him fiddling with the volume button a la Napoleon.

This is what I've made of it so far:


No blurb as yet, still wrestling with that... 

Anyway, encouraged by my tablet I started playing about.... 

Here I have a print with foreground and sky added to make it the right proportions to wrap around as a book cover...
I pulled up the colour on this by increasing the saturation  but her face was obscured, and it may not be strictly accurate but I cut the bonnet away for the final pic, gave her another eye, and some curls to make her face stand out.  I added a hero for her too.


 And now all I need to do is to write a story to suit it... 

The hero and heroine in this one came as a pair, and I'm not about to turn down an absolute gift like that - they are from Le Beau Monde 1807

And this one is a book on the go, 'The Unwilling Viscount' is 8 chapters in so far...





And just in case I manage a sequel to Vanities and Vexations, I have found some different pilasters to make the foreground from, to put people against.  I used the eyedropper to get the exact same colour as the original...


Not much to look at now, but with pretty ladies and dashing gents leaning on it, who knows!

4 comments:

  1. They all look AMAZING, Sarah!!!

    Clio1792

    ReplyDelete
  2. Many thanks, Clio! great fun to do, too!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hi.I leave a pm on your hardware zone account underneath the nickname of
    Producible.I hope you may take a glance at it and reply back once you're free.Thanks
    graphics tablet.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Seher, I don't even know what a hardware zone account IS, let alone that I might have one, or how to find it. You might as well write Ancient Greek, actually if you wrote Ancient Greek I'd have a better chance of understanding than modern geek.

    ReplyDelete