Fun with covers

I've been tagging my covers if they have a predominant color, and decided to play with them a bit more by making this rainbow mosaic:

Blue is the most common cover by far -- I have about 127 tagged as "cover blue". Green is next. There are a fair bit of red and orange, but some covers I had trouble deciding which they were! Yellow can be orange-y too. Purple is not that common.

Get some of the James Bama covers for the Doc Savage books. He liked to use a predominate monotone color. Of course, many of the Doc Savage books have a color in the title.

>2 amysisson:
I found the same challenge. Out of my 1,500 books I've only managed to tag five as 'Cover violet' and out of those, three are a bit of a long stretch.
As soon as I am satisfied with my own mosaic I'll upload it here. Thanks for starting off such an interesting idea. Yours looks super great by the way! :)

Oh, fun!

How do you create a mosaic?

^lilithcat, I snagged the covers using SnagIt (unfortunately not a free program, but I'd splurged on it a while back because I use it for a lot of things), then inserted them into Microsoft Publisher and re-sized each to be the same height. That wasn't difficult because in Publisher you can have things "snap to" rulers and guidelines. Once I had them in place, I re-snagged the whole thing as a single image.

>5 lilithcat:
If you are using Windows its relatively easy and free to do (I'm sure its just as easy on a Macintosh too).

First Tag your images appropriately: 'Cover Red', 'Cover orange', 'Cover yellow', Cover green', etc.
Once you have a good selection of each colour of the spectrum, Go to 'Your books' in LibraryThing and select 'Covers', then start by selecting 'Colour Red' in 'Tags'. You will now see displayed one or more rows of appropriately coloured books. By pressing the Ctrl+PrntScr keys on your keyboard you can copy what you see on the monitor to your mouse clipboard.

Next, open 'Paint' from your OS.
Now, press 'Paste'. You will now have a screen shot of the whole page. Pick the 'Select' tool and drag it around the row of images you want to keep and press 'Cut'.
Create a 'New' file and, in order to give yourself plenty of room, first select 'Resize' to make sure you start with a nice square area select 'Pixels' and then match your vertical to the horizontal figure and press 'OK'.
Then hit 'Paste'. Save it as a file and repeat the steps for each colour, adding each row to the new file you have created, one below the other.
You should be able to get a perfectly satisfactory result for free (I like *Free). Enjoy. ;)

Here is a quick one I knocked up using the above method. Not as slick as amysisson's (I know!), but it should bring a bit of fun to everyone's lives I hope. It took me about half one hour; but, I also had to fuss around with the last row to make it look a bit better, due to having different height books. ;)



Once again; many thanks to amysisson for this fun idea. :)

p.s. Funnily enough I've got one of the Dune books in my collage as well, except mine is green not orange! ;)

^Lovely! Funny to see the mix of horror (Amityville Curse and Satan!) and children's books!

>9 amysisson:. Hmm... If I had had a larger selection of usable book covers in my collection to choose from there would have been better triage of the covers! I had to laugh too when I stood back to look at it the first time. ;)
What I did like about it was the 'paint drip' effect the last row gave. That was a happy accident.

I'm afraid this got to be a bit large, but lets see:



The idea was to take all 216 colors of the form r,g,b where r, g or b can be 00,33,66,99,cc or ff and put them into a matrix.
Then for each cover scale it to 1x1 take the color of that one pixel and map to the same 216 colors and replace the color tile with a resized version of the cover. As you can see only about half of the tiles are replaced, even though I've got more than 7000 covers.

What a lovely idea, bnielsen!

>11 bnielsen: Dude, that is stunning. Well done for taking this idea to the next level. Now wrap the whole thing within a four dimentional tesseract construct and I'll crown you king of the cover art challenge. :D

Oh wow, that is terrific!

>13 Sylak:. Actually I avoided going that way :-) Take a look at allrgb.com to see where that leads!

I think the next idea (snatched from allrgb.com) is to take a lot of covers chosen randomly and then sort by color and see what happens.