The Village library is full of some entertaining and suspenseful reads.  It’s important to have hobbies and materials that keep our minds busy.  We recently had several donations of “I Can Read” books all from different Community members.

Cataloging new arrivals in The Village library

Odd.

I picked up The Schizoid Man and thumbed through it.  I’ll add it to the collection despite the worn and torn book cover.

Beggars can’t be choosers, amirite?

How I did it:

Several Village dwellers created some impressive book covers from scratch.  I took the “creative edit approach” as The Village psychiatrist calls it.

I wanted to capture the essence of Rover as well as the lava lamps that appear throughout The Prisoner.  I found a Creative Commons licensed lava lamp photo (thanks Anderaz) through Photo Pin.  I imported that into GIMP and erased everything but the three bubbles.  I think my next steps involved playing around with greyscale, contrast, the invert tool, and maybe some other things.  I took a few screenshots, but couldn’t really tell you the order I did things:

Tinkering with contrast

Tinkering with grayscale

Tinkering with invert

Tinkering with brightness and contrast

After the lava lamp/Rover was all set, I downloaded Mitch’s War Games cover and proceeded with my “creative edits,” which I now feel kind of lame about, because the book cover is copyrighted.  I supposed I could argue that it all falls within Fair Use, but still….

My creative edits included:  change the book number from 15 to 2, changing the copyright date from 1964 to 1967 (when The Prisoner) came out, changing the book cover image (obviously) and the text.  It would behoove me create my own book cover, because I could benefit from experimenting with different effects and brushes and other tools available to master image manipulators.