Just about ready

Here’s a great big diaper box full of DVDs headed to Oklahoma City with me this weekend – hopefully no one will think that the contents are full of crap! 😛 I’m a few more copies of the Brown Box twin-pack away from being finished with both duplication and packaging. I’m amazed I haven’t killed an inkjet cartridge yet, with the dark “woodgrain” cover on the Brown Box.

Those not making it to OEGE this weekend who have pre-ordered will probably get their copies early next week – I may mail some out as early as Thursday. Now, ready to see something else cool? Well, I think it’s cool. Not sure anyone else will.

This is a very strong candidate for the cover of the upcoming Doctor Who nonfiction book I’m working on. You may think I’m being stupidly bold for using a screengrab for an “unauthorized” book, but here’s the trick: it’s not a screengrab. It’s a combination of about three photos, all of which I took on a table in the living room at midnight a few nights ago 😆 and they all looked very much like they do here – i.e. colorful moody lighting, etc.; the only computer-generated element is a wireframe police box which, on this squashed-down copy, you can barely see as a green blob on the scanner screen. Everything else was shot practical photography, and the colors were amped up somewhat in post production with a little bit of a “glow” added to everything to hide the joins and unify the image a bit; the whole thing is then covered with a combination of filters and other effects (detailed several months ago) to give it a drawn/painted/almost-graphic-novel look (which probably doesn’t come across with this very small version). I’ll post more at a later date on how it’s all put together, but it comes very close to the concept I have in my brain for the cover art. I have a couple of other ideas I want to try within this same basic framework, but…man, this is awfully close to what’s in my head, actually much closer than I expected to be able to get. In case this small version doesn’t get it across: it’s supposed to be a hybrid between old TARDIS and new, with a large panel of the new TARDIS console apparently revealing the original console controls, and the “walls” are meant to straddle old and new as well. Not unlike the book itself.

I don’t do nearly enough of this kind of photography, and I’m thinking that needs to change, or my grandfather will be revving up to a 3500RPM spin in his grave. There are times when I look at a picture I’m about to take, or have just taken, and I can almost hear him telling me what to do different. And the thing of it is, he’s usually right.