Beyond Photoshop

Here's a new image I made for a Book Cover project I have for my graphic design class. I was asked to choose a book I have already read and to design a book cover for it. I wanted to do The Tao of Pooh but the cover for that just can't really be beat. So I decided to do it for Sidhartha instead. I have been reading the book and I came across a passage where Sidhartha was disilusioned with being a Samana, and he felt like he was stuck in the wheel of samsara, but his best friend Govinda told him that it is more like a spiral, and that yes we go in circles, but ever upward. I liked that optimistic view and I knew that I wanted that spiral to be a part of my design.

For me the spiral represents the life span. It starts in a small limited orbit, then the circle becomes considerably larger in mid life, and then it eventually winds down to stillness and death in late life.

I used Blender, a free & open source 3d application to create the 3d spiral in Grayscale. Then I imported the final render into Photoshop where I converted it to a hue, played with blend modes and did color correction. For the glow I just duplicated the spiral and applied gausin blur and applied an alpha mask so that the original spiral render showed through completely crisp. Not impressive at all in terms of technical ability or 3d skills, but the result is pretty.