Cover Reveal + Digital Painting: A Deeper Glance

 I'm going to start a new ongoing blog event. A week prior to each new book release, I'm going to do what amounts to an in-depth cover reveal, one that shows both progress and explains it in small part for other artists looking to do their own freehand covers.

In order to make this a bonafide tutorial, it would be a gargantuan post (it's already going to be pretty huge as is) so my blog isn't a good place to walk you through my torrid affair with Clip Studio Paint. However, I thought I'd give you a visual tour of the process I go through with character art. You'll probably be amazed by how simply it is to achieve stunning effects. I don't intend to make this seem simple. It took maybe 2-3 days of working, all day, to achieve these results because there's a lot of blending and editing and scrapping involved.

First off, the line drawing.

You can use a reference photo, a model, your own mental library of faces and skills here. These lines were blended a bit because they were in the final visible layers but you can see many of them were just rough lines that I either cleaned up or covered at some point. The great part about layers is that you can turn them on and off, change the entire color with a slider, add effects, etc. without disturbing any other layers. This is why it's so important to work on separate layers for every element that may be independently edited later.

Simple colorbase added to the layer behind the line drawing. Good to use a solid color. If you need to select it to do some messy shading on a new layer, you can keep it isolated within the selected area easier. Use solid color bases as isolation guides!

This was a hairy layer, using a furry textured brush. Reylon is a panther Felisfolk (cat hybrid) so fur is part of his genetics.

I usually do multiple layers to shade the lips but since this was a uniform hue with his coloring, I threw caution to the wind. This is what I would mostly call the medium shade layer.

This is hard to see a big difference from the last, but I darkened the base of his eyes here.

Last for the skin layers, I added subtle highlights for depth.

I started with darkening the corners. He has panther eyes, so the iris is naturally larger, almost encompassing the whole eye, but it is still subtly round.

Once again a color base, but once more adding the darker shading along the iris.

The light yellow iris lines come next...

When you study eyes, the best way to keep a dark pupil from flattening is a slight outline of either the darkest line of the iris or a dark grey. I used the dark gold again here.

Naturally, the pupil come next, but it still seems a little flat.

Funny what a reflective shine can do to fix that.

Let's makes the skin layers visible again...

Again, a subtle change. This layer darkened the folds of his eyelids.

Guide layers! I use these a lot and they go away later. I use them not only for hairlines, but clothes, jewelry, anything I need to scribble down then refine later.

In this case, I added the stubble of a shaved head first.

Then this piled mess of a colorbase...

Some subtle lock lines.

More highlights...

Beads and bones at the gathering point of his hair.

I moved to the bottom of my layer list to add the locks behind his head.

And some more behind that to give it more body and dimension.

This was a few more layers where I played with the idea of the hair down but it looked way too romance cover for my taste. Reylon lives in a pard or a tribal type society so it's very unlikely he'd have silky windblown hair getting in his way.

The background is a preset. I do backgrounds on occasion, but they aren't my favorite and there are tons of free stock available for people who are in the same boat. I did deepen the saturation and blur it a bit from the original. I rarely ever use any stock photo as is.

And there we have it. Reylon, the subject of the 5th book cover in all of his glory. Be sure to check out A World Reborn: Higher Reasoning. If I have the 6th cover ready, I'm hoping the finale and the trilogy compilation are to follow by early June. The last three may come out fairly quickly since I'm working on their covers simultaneously.

Have you been following the series? Conor and Calyra are the cover models for Book 6 so I hope you're curious to see my take on them. As usual, I don't hope to influence how you see them. In fact, I want to see some fan art! Stick figures, 30 foot sculptures, no heartfelt attempt will be shunned. I do have a fan art link on my site and maybe you'll see yours featured there! I'll have to start brainstorming some ideas for contests to sweeten the pot. Let me know what you think.

Hope I could shed some light on the wonderful world of digital painting! I'm always improving and can't wait to show you more in the months ahead.

More to look for-- I intend to do a couple of comprehensive posts on formatting and cover assembly. Formatting will use Word options, but the concept is pretty universal across word processors. I also use PhotoShop for cover assembly, but again, programs like Gimp should serve the same purpose. If you have any technical questions for me, I'd be more than happy to answer or make it the subject of a future blog post. I truly enjoy simplifying the process for others. It took a lot of trial and error and it was impossible to find all the information in one place, so I endeavor to get some more comprehensive tutorials in place when possible.