Cover work: RAETIAN TALES

by Diane Duane

Covers. Even when they’re almost done they’re not that almost done…

Here the mountain girl Mariarta dil Alicg and her great-stag Grugni look down at a bewitched Aletsch Glacier in a color “sketch” of the wraparound cover for the forthcoming paperback (and the re-cover for the ebook version) of Raetian Tales: A Wind from the South.

The character rendering is in DAZ Studio: the background rendering, in Terragen 3.0. The terrain is derived from Swiss radar data of the Jungfrau region, accurate to about a meter: the three-glacier junction known as “Place de la Concorde” is directly below.

…Yeah, I know, Mati needs a winter coat. I’m working on it. The trouble is that most of the women’s coats available at Daz seem designed to show as much of the woman as possible.  (In fact 98% of the women’s clothing there constitutes the most blatant proof possible of the Male Gaze concept.)  Right now Mariarta’s wearing men’s clothes (which is fine since she’s doing that in the book as well), but finding a decent men’s winter coat that also looks like something you might have worn in the 1100s is proving a little bit of a challenge.

And forget cloaks. I refuse to put Mariarta in a cloak. Every damn pre-medieval heroine seems to wear a cloak. And this is a huntress who doesn’t need a damn cloak flapping around while she runs around the Alps shooting chamois and hunting down rogue goddesses.

(sigh) Back to it. There’s work still to be done on the glacier and some of the snow, and I’m not sure I’m happy with the lighting yet…

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