Exode Cover Art

Version 1.0 Exode book cover.

I'm continuing the process of updating my cover art for the science fiction novels in my copyleft Exode Trilogy. The lower panel of the original book cover for Exode showed Parthney and his megepi at Demon Lodge on the planet Hemmal. Towards the top, I tried to depict Earth and some planets of the galactic core. The catch phrase for Parthney's Exode business while he is stationed on Earth is "Change your world".

For the version 2.0 cover, I wanted to change the appearance of Ario and D'hab so as to give them a slightly non-human look. Since some models and photographers object to splicing and modifying their photos, I found two stock images from Cathleen Tarawhiti that I could alter to make the model appear slightly alien.

Katrina (background)

For anyone making non-commercial use of her stock images, Cathleen provides these instructions at deviantART, "NO restrictions, just credit me and leave a message here".

For my character D'hab, I started with a photograph of Toni Moore. I modified her  hair, eyes and ear to make a slightly alien look.

For Ario, I used an image of Katrina Chadwick. I experimented with altering the clothing and background (see the image to the left), but then decided to keep those as they were in the version 1.0 cover. In Exode, besides himself, the members of Parthney's megepi are all pek, so they are capable of morphing their facial features into any convenient form. In this part of the story, the pek have fun befuddling Parthney by adopting whimsical "looks".

source image (left), Ario (right)

source image (left), D'hab (right)

In this point in the story, Parthney is going along with Reginal's plan of trying to not upset the Prelands with his unconventional music. It is unusual for pek to participate as kanen, so they perform while "in disguise". Parthney has never seen a Preland, so when the pek say they are adopting the facial features of a Preland, he has to trust them.

Version 2.0 Exode book cover.
See the image credits on this page.

The other member of the megepi is Reginal. Reginal functions as a bothet, so for her disguise she has adopted a female human form. I used DAZ Studio software to render the images of Reginal and Parthney.

Changing Worlds
The image of Earth is a public domain image from NASA. The other two planets are in the galactic core, the part of the galaxy where the pek have little trouble finding suitable planets for their efforts to develop new types of humans. These planets are from images that came up in Google's image search for works that are free to reuse with modification. Both were downloaded from Wikimedia Commons (Noviomagus Celestia, HD 85512 b (Artists's impression)).

Parthney does not realize that he is also in disguise. His biological mother was Trysta, and Asterothrope from the far future. However, during his embryonic development, Parthney's morphological structure was altered so as to conform to a typical human form.

Next: new cover art for Foundations of Eternity.

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