So, now it's time I made a cover for Deleted Magic. Oh yes. It may have been a long time coming, but here's an official cover for Deleted Magic.
I used Coov's template, and was inspired by his design slightly. Should go nicely with the covers he's already designed, and the covers previously posted in this thread, some of which I quite like and have saved.
Large:
http://orangecow.org/starwars/swcovers-ocp/deletedmagicnew.jpg
I had planned to do a pretty complex montage of images, but that was already covered by the filmstrip at the bottom (a recreation of something Coov did) ... so I decided to keep the design really simple, with a "Life on Tattooine" feel similar to some of the earlier designs various people did.
I centered it around one really strong image, of the gang at Anchorhead - Luke, Fixer, Camie and Biggs.
This was originally a black and white image, used by Coov on his design. I liked the look of it as a cover, so I went ahead and spent ages colorizing it, trying to be careful in what I did so that it would actually look like it was originally a color image. I used a lot of tricks - I would color balance the bright areas differently from the dark areas, to give it the look of color film processing (where the darks tend to go blue or red).
Luke's face is from a different photo, a color photo. I didn't like the photo of Luke that came with this picture, so I took one from the Lars garage which I happened to have in hi-res. I put the floppy hat and goggles on him and voila.
The problem was that with this image, which was originally color, it became easier to tell that the other people had been colorized .... so I did some weird colorization to both Luke and everyone else to make them match better .... basically ruining the colors on Luke to make him look more similar to the others!
The image of Jabba on the back is a pretty weird one. I almost didn't use it, but I had spent so long making it that I thought hey, why not. I had a small image of Declan Mulholland looking at the camera as Jabba, which was taken from a signed photo I found on the web. I took that little image of his face and put it on a low-res body from the Jabba scene, then I worked on the body a bit and gave it a "burlap" texture so it was harder to tell how poor the body really was. I gave him some more hair which I stole from the photo of Fixer on the front. And then I drew eyes on him since his eyes weren't really visible in the picture. The result still looks pretty weak, and I think I might have made his hair too short, but it's nice to have him on there.
The font used is Big Caslon, which is the same font used for the subtitles in the film!
The Deleted Magic logos are Coov's versions.
The filmstrip at the bottom is basically from Coov's version, but I put a different type of filmstrip perforation around the edges because I thought it could look better, and some of the images were replaced - Camie, Jabba and 3PO ripping the sign off were replaced with better versions, and after trying a picture of Luke's bacta mask out (to replace the image of George Lucas, which I moved to a more prominent place on the back cover) ... I wound up using instead the controversial image of Luke and Leia about to kiss, from the Empire trailer.
Yep. We've got two deleted Leia kisses here, and one is with Luke. No wonder Han and Jenny seem a little confused/nervous.