Cover Workaround?

AoE is basically ready to go, but I need a cover for it. The last time I checked, a professionally illustrated cover would cost between $500 and $1,500. That's not an option, especially with the other books needing better covers as well. I can paint. I can even paint things that aren't bad, but there's a difference between a painting and a cover illustration.

I had this hope that I could paint a cover and then go over the painting with painting pens or perhaps use the pens along the way. I hoped that would give me illustration-type details that are extremely time-consuming to achieve with brushes. I bought a few pens. They're useful but limited. For a painting I need to mix custom colors. The pens can't do that. Basing the colors around the pen colors isn't the best option, as I would be limited in what I could do.

Maybe I have an idea that could work. I have a drawing tablet that I picked up on sale for $56.99 back in 2011. It came with Corel Painter Essentials 4, which I don't have installed on my current PC. At some other time I picked up Corel Painter Lite, which I do have installed. I got the tablet out this week and messed around with Painter Lite. Unhappy with it, I ended up downloading some other painting programs. I'm not thrilled with any of them, though Paintstorm Studio has a lot of nice brushes.

The main problem I have is these programs advertise themselves as bringing painting to the computer, but none of them seem to do that. Of the programs I've tried so far, only Corel Painter Lite has actual artist colors like cadmium red, ultramarine blue, etc. The problem with that program is I can't seem to be able to create and save a palette. I have a standard set of colors I use for painting that I use to blend custom colors. I need those colors on a palette. The way it's set up, I would have to create a new palette for every painting. Unless I'm missing something. There's no Create Palette option. Maybe it's in the full version. They don't even call it a palette. It's swatches. No painter calls a palette swatches.

The full version of Corel Painter is $399, although older versions are much cheaper on Amazon. Maybe that would work. Or maybe I need something like CorelDRAW, which is geared toward illustration. That program is even more expensive than Painter and not a real option.

I'm still trying to figure out something that will work. It's possible I could put some colors at the top of a real canvas, take a picture of it and use that as my palette in one of these programs. At the end of the painting, I could crop the top off and voilà. It's also possible I could manually enter the RGB values for the paints. Maybe I could paint a painting and then tweak it in a program.

Using the drawing tablet is its own headache. Maybe I just need to get used to it. The colors don't blend in any of the programs I've tried the way real paint does. They try to fake it, but the limitations are going to take getting used to. It's more like drawing than painting.

Maybe I'm on the verge of coming out with a great, new set of covers or maybe not. I need to find the right tool and figure out how to make it work the way it's advertised. I've seen tons of computer art. Nearly all of it looks like cheap, fake computer art. If I could get the right palette and the right program, I think I can avoid that cheap, fake look.

Have a great weekend.