taerkitty
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Feedback Requested for Cover art
- Thread starter taerkitty
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Tyranomaster
Guy who writes stuff
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What is the story about? A cover is more than just bait. If I feel lied to by cover art, then I stop reading.
Prince_Azmiran_Myrian
🐉Religious zealot exhorting Dragons for Jesus🐉
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I agree with the title. Can't have dragons soon enough.
Overall, I like it.
If I'm nitpicking then the hand and eyes are noticeable. Theres also a wisp of light going into her chest.
I'm unsure if the title colors stand out enough, though I do like them. I'm no expert.
Overall, I like it.
If I'm nitpicking then the hand and eyes are noticeable. Theres also a wisp of light going into her chest.
I'm unsure if the title colors stand out enough, though I do like them. I'm no expert.
D
Deleted member 84247
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There is a bit of handn't going on, but overall it is alright.
taerkitty
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Tossed the original image through Dall-E to fix her hand:
taer × DALL·E | Fix her hand. Her fingers are outstretched.
Created with DALL·E, an AI system by OpenAI
labs.openai.com
Broke out the title into 3 separate transparent PNGs so I could resize them and overlap them for a bit of font art.
Genres: Comedy, Fantasy, School Life, Slice of Life
Tags: Academy, Apathetic Protagonist, Aristocracy, Autism, Awkward Protagonist, Calm Protagonist, Child Protagonist, Cohabitation, Comedic Undertone, Cute Protagonist, Different Social Status, Disabilities, European Ambience, Fantasy World, Female Protagonist, Honest Protagonist, Lack of Common Sense, Low-Key Protagonist, Magic, Magical Technology, Multiple POV, Multiple Protagonists, Orphans, Poor Protagonist, Quiet Characters, Quirky Characters, Roommates, Royalty, Seeing Things Other Humans Can't, Shy Characters, Teachers, Underestimated Protagonist, Wizards,
Short Synopsis: The Athehamian Royal Academy of Arts, Sciences, and Thaumaturgy has the best teachers, the most accomplished students, and the most advanced facilities. But will it be able to handle Eleonoria and the girls of Althea Hall E-14?
Long Synopsis will have to wait until I write more of it. I'm pantsing this as a Light Novel and writing the events as they come to me. The general idea is that this autistic girl will cause them to rethink what they know about magic and mana and the world around them because she doesn't just think outside of the box, she doesn't even see the box.
Fixed the hand, but am curious about the eyes. I'm not seeing it and would like to know what I missed.
I'm no expert on cover design (as evidenced by the first post) nor an artist, so this is my first try in a long time. Previous ones were for friends' works on FictionPress and FanFiction, so it's not like the bar is high for either of them. If anything, the quality bar on SH appears to be much higher, one of the reasons why I'm spending more time here.
Yeah, Fotor AI often has a hard time with hands. So does OpenAI's Dall-E, but I was able to get it to somewhat make a save.
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taerkitty
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Would be greatly appreciated. I'm on fixed income, so I can only dream of having my own generative AI.
Attachments
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Too Long Before Dragons Original.jpg
Prince_Azmiran_Myrian
🐉Religious zealot exhorting Dragons for Jesus🐉
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Very minor but to me one eye is better outlined than the other and the lash shapes are little mismatched but as I said I'm nitpicking and may not actually be a big deal.
D
Deleted member 84247
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There are some free ai generators out there.
taerkitty
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Ha, ha! Now I can't unsee it!
Yeah, I use Bing + Dall-E a lot. It says it gives 100 tokens / week, but it seems to be refilling my stash daily. I'm not complaining.
Dall-E on OpenAI's site gives 15 tokens a month (I think)
I haven't had much luck with Stable Diffusion Online, but I think that gives 30 a month.
Fotor gives 5, so it barely qualifies, but I bit the bullet and subscribed because it's so cool! Oh, look! Shiny!
Those are amazing. Thank you!
I did the layout in Inkscape, so it was easy to swap out the background graphic. Thanks, @Syringe !
EDIT: Thanks, but am avoiding the serafuku trope.
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TheEldritchGod
A Cloud Of Pure Spite And Eyes
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It's too big.
That's better.
That's better.
taerkitty
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Thanks! Didn't realize I could resize them in the BBcode. From now on, I'll be sure to add
Code:
width="160px"taerkitty
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And which one did my friends like best? FML...
Welcome to Taerkitty's BipolarLand! Here's the latest cover (for a story that might never see light of day, but whatever.)
Background image created in Dream.ai. Logo courtesy of cooltext.com. Composited in Inkscape. The spine art is just pure whimsy; at best this will be "published" (read: shared) online for free.
Genres: Action, School Life, Sci-fi, Slice of Life, Supernatural
(Italicized tags are in the few chapters I've written so far. Unitalicized tags are planned.)
Tags: Academy, Artificial Intelligence, Autism, Automatons, Character Growth, Child Protagonist, Clever Protagonist, Earth Invasion, Female Protagonist, Futuristic Setting, Gate to Another World, Human Experimentation, Hunters, Lack of Common Sense, Magic, Magic Beasts, Military, Monsters, Mutated Creatures, Mutations, Non-linear Storytelling, Outcasts, Psychic Powers, Roommates, Special Abilities, Weak to Strong, World Invasion
Short Synopsis: The 2025 Superflare ravaged the Earth. The day-long Coronal Mass Ejection inflicted a global EMP blackout, caused supercells and hurricanes, and triggered massive tidal and seismic activity. In spite of all this, surviving humanity recovered, faster and better than ever before.
However, in the late early 2060s, grandchildren of the Superflare generation started evidencing unexplained abilities during their adolescence. Governments, eager to tap this unknown resource, eagerly collected these children to shape their minds, harden their bodies, and hone their minds.
Be it prescience or providence, these young PsiOps cadets will suddenly be thrown into the front lines when meteor strikes open chasms filled with monsters and danger.
However, that's yet to come. For now, 12-year-old Celeste sees the Special Academy as a way to pull herself and her family out of the Laborer Class. Her journey through the Special Academy, onto the front lines against monsters, into the dungeons, and finally arriving at the cause for this destruction will cause changes that will shape the world.
Long Synopsis / Background Notes: As mentioned, this is a rewrite for Too Long Before Dragons, but as science fantasy. The core idea is still the same: for the neruodivergent protagonist use her autistic traits to challenge conventional wisdom for the day and to (blithely) unearth new aspects to whatever parahuman power exists in the setting, be it magic or psionics.
Stories that rationalize parahuman abilities often leads to info-dumps. This one will (try to) avoid this by starting with psionics as reproducible, but inexplicable abilities. As scientists unravel the causes, Celeste will continue to contribute to breakthroughs to further frustrate them.
The story starts as the typical bullied woobie, so sad, so sad. Then she manages to attend Special Academy, overcoming many obstacles along the way. In Special Academy, she will face more trials, both as part of the curriculum as from her peers. As she nears graduation, the meteors land, opening up what are essentially dungeons.
Her training as a government asset will have to be repurposed to defend the people from magical creatures emerging from these maws. Collapsing the entrance only delays their emergence. Armed with mining tools, enhanced with magic, the dungeon creatures will doggedly create another exit, and then another.
Normal weapons are less effective than expected, with the monsters quickly self-healing their wounds so long as they're still alive. (Throw enough C4 at it, and you'll solve any problem, right?) Inexplicably, monster injured from like-for-like magical attacks heal much slower. Flesh wounds from conventional small arms are healed before the attackers' eyes. Skeletal damage will persist, but not incapacitate the magical beast. Limb loss has been documented to regrow over a matter of days to weeks.
Whereas a monster will easily heal a gunshot wound, it still will be incapable of recovering in a timely fashion from a bullet freshly removed from a cartridge and telekinetically accelerated to the same speed. Burns inflicted by a pyrokineticist are not immediately scabbed over, and the monster has a greater chance of being degraded from pain and/or tissue damage.
Over time, humans learn merely killing the monsters after they emerge from the dungeon is not enough. Older dungeons are spawning more dangerous monsters. Recently-developed long-ranged matter-penetrating imaging devices show dungeons are slowly expanding, growing deeper. Scientists have too many questions that cannot be answered from merely observing above-ground.
By now a veteran PsiOp, Celeste will join others to become Hunters, dungeon explorers. They must discover how dungeons continue to grow, how to possibly stop their growth, and most importantly, why they exist and are growing. Once that is discovered, they struggle to subjugate the many existing dungeons worldwide. All the while, meteors are intermittently falling, creating new ones.
With skilled Hunters being in short supply, and having a limited shelf life, not all dungeons are ordered stopped. Those located in remote, unoccupied areas with natural barriers, such as deserted islands, are left remotely monitored and subject to scheduled bombardment.
The last arcs show the result of an unchecked dungeon: once a dungeon core reaches a certain depth, it gathers the energy available there to summon a Demon Lord. With a Demon Lord in command, the monsters no longer are random, wandering dangers. Instead, they become an invading army, organized, cunning, and much, much more dangerous.
Celeste at this point is one of the most experienced Hunters still alive. She and other surviving elites go beyond defeating the Demon Lord, they discover how it was summoned. After that, they must execute a desperate plan to stop the invasion at its source.
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D
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That's okay because daylight is bad. *Hisssss*