Seeing an app that a friend had used had me checking it out. I became intrigued at what it could do in terms of creating a work of art using the computer. The sited used various styles of artistic expression that could transform your photo into a painting.
The potential is beyond anything I'd previously seen. Gimp produced an oil painting kind of look, but it didn't add the style element. Other photo programs can do that too, but it never satisfied what I thought would be great on a cover.
So I played with it using images I'd gotten at Stencil. You can probably imagine what I had in mind-- original book covers, in my case for the paranormals. The potential seemed great despite that the images it created were smaller than a book cover would need. This is a free program, but there is one I could purchase. I though had a bigger concern... copyrights. One thing I am very cautious about with my work, including this blog-- that whatever I use is open to being used. For book covers, I don't take images from Google but from my own photos or sites I have paid to use-- like Stencil, with a lifetime membership.
"All of the background photos and icons in Stencil are royalty-free and safe to use! In fact, they're under a special public domain Creative Commons license called "CC0". That means you can use these photos however you want. We mean that literally. Personal, commercial, blog posts, posters...anything. Also, there's no attribution required whatsoever!"As a writer, I've had my books taken by sites that sell them or give them away. You can protest but often they crop up again somewhere else. For writers, like me, who don't make a lot of money anyway, that hurts. As does when someone goes to Amazon, buys an eBook and returns it right away after either reading it or saving it to their hard drive. I imagine they figure what is the writer out? Well, a living is one thing or in my case money that goes toward the grandkids' college educations. So I don't want to cheat anybody else out of their creative work.
After studying Dreamscope's copyright page, I am unsure if it is a program I can use for my covers. It's for fun and private use. I am assuming that covers a blog like this one. If that is not the case, I might hear from them as I am about to give its link here for others who might find it fun. I did write them to ask if there is anyway to use them as the covers. They would be awesome on paranormals, but alas it might be even if they said I could get the license the cost would be above my pay grade.
The lamb was created using the filter they called oil pastel portrait. The blonde beauty was altered with thick oil filter-- and the one below is Picasso I. Use is simple. Find your photo, put it in the box, choose the filter and click the button. They can be put at Pinterest, Facebook, Google, etc. directly from there, or you can save them to your harddrive.
