The GLOW: 1996 Psychic Eustace Delmont. Intermission #2 - Creating The "Soulburn" Art
- "Previously..." and Campaign/Arc Summary
- The GLOW 1996: Psychic Eustace Delmont Intermission #2 - Creating The "Soulburn" Art
- Creating a New Art Style
- Step One: First, a Photo
- Step Two: Second, Setting Up Layers
- Step Three: Making the Outline
- Step Four: Adding the "Soulburn"
- Step Five: Manipulating the Image
- Option: Using Masks to Create Focus Points
- Credits
Previously, on The GLOW: 1996 Psychic Eustace Delmont
Eustace and Hitomi have started gathering up gear and resources to make their way in The GLOW. While they have a short breather, they plan to pick up a job or two. But first, let's take a look at the art I am working on to show Eustace's "Soulburn" vision.
About The GLOW: 1996 Psychic Eustace Delmont
Eustace Delmont is a psychic on the cusp of "graduating" into a full-blow Field Psychic. He requests his right to Walk, a brief period of freedom to encourage psychics to see the other side of The GLOW. He tries to finish his long-time partner Jani Blum's final unfinished mission: to find a mini-disc and crack open the Patel crime family. He meets Hitomi Meyer, a criminal hacker. The two are now on the run between a powerful crime family and an even more powerful adversary: The Order and its plans for Eustace.
Content Warning: Occasionally very foul language, lots of smoking, quite intense violence, drinking, gambling, non-graphic sex, drugs, criminal behavior, and black magic. The GLOW is a world of spiritual torture and weird horror.
This post is in the standard Doug Alone post style. See Anatomy of a Post for more details.
Attribution for the tools and materials used—including the splash art—can be found in the Credits below along with some details.
The GLOW: 1996 Psychic Eustace Delmont. Intermission #2 - Creating The "Soulburn" Art
Creating a New Art Style
I try and give many of my arcs their own vibe when it comes to visual elements. The Bleak + The Pearl gets the harsh two-tone graphics with high contrast. The Bloody Hands got 18th and 19th century oil paintings. Eustace & Hitomi got photos [sometimes actually of the 90s] rendered in such a way to look like bad print offs of news articles. To begin with, The GLOW had a fairly unique aspect for this blog: paid stock art. It was technically the second time I bought paid stock art for the blog. There was meant to be an Ick & Humb arc kicked off last in 2024 that had Dean Spencer's art to represent some of the characters. That got cut off, though, when I was a bit overwhelmed trying to figure out how to bring the 3.5 active campaigns on the blog to a close. It will show up, maybe in an arc or two, but this means The GLOW "1996 Agent Johnny Blue" got through the gate first.
As much as 100% love and recommend Dean Spencer's artwork, and will continue to use it every few posts, I did want to come up with a method for an extended The GLOW "1996 Psychic Eustace Delmont" arc that did not end up having to reuse much art or force the campaign to change gears too much.
Playing around last week, I came up with a method I liked. And, partially to encourage myself to do more experiments, I thought I would share it more generally. It is not an advanced technique. It is just a simple way to take photos that match roughly what I see when I imagine The GLOW.
This will also help me sort one of the missing New Year's Resolutions where I had plans to try and come up with some easy links to free art and such. A step one, if you will.
Step One: First, a Photo
The first step is to find a photo that I think would work. What am I looking for? That kind of changes but generally a city scene. One with few people or where the people will fade a bit in the background. I usually have a few "keywords" in mind like warehouse or dock or nightclub. The technique I am working with seems to go better when the picture is a bit dark, with distinct lines, and has some definite splashes of light or color. I would like it to be a human-generated photo rather than one touched up heavily by either Generative AI or by extensive photo manipulation.
Good sources of open-reuse art that I use include:
There are others. A lot of these are simply user-generated content and so quality is variable. Some allow Generative AI and so I try to filter around it. A few times it can be hard to tell. I check things like the re-use. The fact that these pictures will be used to tell some fairly violent and potentially disturbing stories means that I try and not step on too many toes. This makes it weird if I am using photos of people.
If I am not sure what photo I want to use, sometimes it helps to just browse those pages and see what leaps out to me. There are several scenes where finding the photo first helps me to frame some details.
For this particular case, I want a cafe. Juan's Cafe. Near Pensacola, FL. Something a bit quirky that could be used as kind of an info spot for Hitomi but which isn't the standard cyber-punk-club style set-up. A place where lower-level operatives her might gather that has a veneer of friendliness.
Since I tend to default to Pixabay, I'll grab this off of Wordpress. It has a good light source. The red poster should pop out a bit. The lines might be a bit fuzzy but we'll play with it. The first step will be trim it down to 1:1 in aspect. I like things to be either landscape or square since it tends to work best with the blog format.
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| A real world cafe with a nice courtyard garden. |
Step Two: Second, Setting Up Layers
The hard part is picking a photo, really. GIMP (the free-open-source image processing program I like to use though there are others) will do a lot of the work. Once I figured out the technique I liked, it is pretty easy to work through the steps in just a few minutes for me.
At this point, I will name the file to whatever it is in my game — for now Juan's Cafe — and then I will name the default/base image as that + [BASE Version] and I will keep it in the background as a fail safe if I get to a point where I need to start over.
I need at least three more layers. I make two copies of the BASE layer: LINES and MODIFIED. LINES is on top. MODIFIED is below LINES. BASE is at the bottom.
I think make a blank/transparent layer in between LINES and MODIFIED and call it SOULBURN.
This would look something like this:
Step Three: Making the Outline
The next is to use the FILTERS → ARTISTIC → PHOTOCOPY on the LINES layer. I'm looking for a good number of outlines that roughly tell the same story as the original photo but also lose some of the finer details. If the outline doesn't quite look right, I can undo it and then go and tweak some of the contrasts/curves of the LINES version of the photo [under the COLOR menu].
There's no one good set of options to choose from. Sometimes I play with some settings to bring up some details or to some some. Just keep "Preview" on and move some sliders and values around until you get something you like. For this demo, I will leave it at GIMP's default settings.
Once I get a a good blend, I think go to COLORS → POSTERIZE → and reduce it to just two colors.
At this point, I go to COLORS — COLOR TO ALPHA and I turn the white portions transparent which will make the lines largely disappear into the layers below but they are still there doing their job.
Step Four: Adding the "Soulburn"
The next step is to add the weird color splotches that represent the Soulburn. Click on the currently blank SOULBURN layer and look for FILTERS → RENDER → NOISE → PLASMA. The first seed option is fine but I usually click the "NEW SEED" button a few times to find a color that "speaks" to the mood I want the scene to have.
At this point all you will be able to see would be the PLASMA layer and the outlines we generated above.
Once you have a good color combination, we need to figure out how much Soulburn we want. The way this is achieved is basically by going back to the layer window and changing the opacity around.
For example, putting it around 2/3s (give or take a slight bit) makes it look something like this:
This is where the darker, more night-time photos can work better because the background tends to fade out a bit while the light in the foreground kicks off a bit harder. With a lot of these photos I go between 50% and 100% depending on how intense I want the Soulburn vibe to be. Around 50% it is very nearly a suggestion. At 100%, reality is just a few outlines. 2/3s to 3/4s is a good blend for a lot of photos.
Step Five: Manipulating the Image
One benefit of this technique is that I can blend and modify lines together as I need. I can cut out text, bring in outlines from other pictures for strange effects, etc.
In this case, I am just going to do two quick modifications using other GIMP filters. I pick the MODIFIED layer. First, FILTERS → ARTISTIC → CARTOON. Play with those settings a bit until I get something that feels a lot like the original picture, just a bit less real. For the demo, I'll keep it mostly the default.
Then, still on the modified layer, FILTERS → ARTISTIC → OILIFY. I often reduce the mask radius on this but for now I'll keep it default.
The overall impact of this step can be pretty minor — especially with an image as evenly lit as this one — but it helps to reinforce this vibe of the Soulburn being just a bit more real than the things it is surrounding. The overall effect is to be something a bit aesthetically pleasing at a glance but kind of off-putting if you try and bring details out of it. As the story goes on, and Eustace is more and more absorbed into the Soulburn, the manipulations will get more pronounced.
Option: Using Masks to Create Focus Points
Another option I can use and will play at with some photos is using ADD A LAYER MASK to the Soulburn layer and the GRADIENT tool to create portions that pop. In this case, I can set the GRADIENT tool options to RADIAL and then either FG-to-TRANSPARENT and use Black (#000000) or have it go from FG-to-BG and set both to various grayscales. Then, use that gradient on the Soulburn's Mask to have portions that fade away to the background but with other places more consumed by the Soulburn.
The overall effect on Juan's Cafe might look like this:
I'm not sure if it works out for this photo in particular but I'll play with it some on others.
CREDITS
The GLOW 1996: Psychic Eustace Delmont is played using Two Little Mouse's Outgunned and Outgunned: Action Flicks (especially, but not limited to "Neon Noir" and "Great Powers"). It uses Larcenous Designs' Gamemaster Apprentice Deck: Cyberpunk 2E as its main oracle.
Other sources used include:
- Zach Best's Universal NPC Emulator.
- Cesar Capacle's Random Realities
- Kevin Crawford's Cities Without Number
- Matt Davis' Book of Random Tables: Cyberpunk 1, 2 and 3.
- Geist Hack Games and Paul D. Gallagher's Augmented Realities.
ART CREDIT AND EXPLANATION
CC0 licensed photo by Anis from the WordPress Photo Directory. Apologies to Anis to turning his lovely photo of a cafe to a hacker hangout.
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