Cover Reveal + Progress Shots

As promised, I'm doing another visual post on the progression of another cover, this one for the upcoming A World Reborn: Deicide book. Let's jump right into it.

As usual, I had started with building the form and color blocking. I always call them 'mannequins' until they start to flesh out into characters. After laying the base color, I usually dive right into the eyes, as I did here.

Calyra and Conor are medium toned like their mother, so I warmed the skin color and began adding shading to the models.

The face certainly turned out different by the end, but I start with some hard lines that get blended out later. Sometimes I keep the original guidelines, but I normally ditch all but the skin toned lines on that layer.

Here, I just did a rough sketch in of her hair. One base is on a layer behind her skin, the other is on top. This way, I can get it dimensional around the model.

A little hard to see, but I use a different layer and a different guide color to draw in clothes and other elements for each character. These are suggestive and often changed drastically when I actually start filling it in.

Just a shot on the detail of their sandals and her painted toenails. For Conor, I only faintly lightened the nail area and opted for a shorter more masculine style.

This is a better view of the guidelines used. I didn't deviate too much from this style.

Since I did quite a bit on the details for the last book, I'll jump ahead to the colored and nearly finished version. I did end up altering the colors a bit, an easy process if you do everything on separate layers!

Had to get a close up on their more desaturated version.

And here we have it! I usually post the panoramic view in a cover art post, which you can locate with that tag on the right side of the blog.

It's certainly been an exciting journey, changing up a bit from my usual comic style. It wouldn't be practical to do comics with this much detail, but I certainly love taking the extra time focusing on one cover like this. As usual, if you have any questions about my process that I haven't covered, either out of curiosity or if you're an artist looking to pick up some new techniques, please feel free to contact me, either through the comments or my email linked to this blog. I usually get back to people pretty quickly (within a day or two).

Thanks for reading!