The Final Chapter, Week 2: You Can Judge This Book By Its Cover
Rohit p -
Hey, everyone! I’ve been pushing through more pages, and this is my current state of mind right now:
Well, it may not exactly be like that, but the work has been very productive (with almost 8 more pages complete).
But enough about that! As I promised, the cover’s getting its own update today. Here’s what it looked like when I first sketched it out on paper:
When creating the cover, I had to select what elements to include. For instance, I placed Marcus, Tonitrus, and the fire monster on the front face of the comic because the first few chapters deal with Marcus’ origin story when acquiring his powers. That’s also part of the reason why I didn’t add Jules or Amber as part of the cover. Although they did play a large role in the first chapter, I thought they would be more important in later chapters not included in this first volume. In addition to the characters, I wanted to add a dynamic pose so that the characters won’t just be standing there like a scarecrow on a stick. Especially with all of the forced perspective drawing practice I had (where body parts and other objects appear to overlap each other), I could better attract the eyes of my readers.
After sketching the cover on paper, I began converting it to digital art using IbisPaint X (the online art software). So far, the lineart is almost complete with its inking (I just have one more layer to finish). Here’s the digital form:
There was one thing from this week – in fact from this entire project – that I’d never thought I would do: coloring my artwork. In one of my earliest blog posts, Jacob asked me if I would set a color scheme for my art, so here’s your answer, Jacob. With the cover that’s soon to come, I can’t have it be plain black and white. So I’ve been browsing through some videos on rendering art and took a step back to study the good old color theory. This has been one of my challenging tasks at hand because I’ve never stopped to think about what colors would fit my characters. Red represents passion and a certain “flame in one’s spirit,” while blue symbolizes wisdom and calmness. And by combining different colors, we can establish a certain mood and scenario that will fuel the reader’s interest in the story. I’ve watched a couple videos on rendering digital art (which basically entails converting a flat, inked drawing to something with color and lighting). I’ll be giving another update on how the coloring process is going soon!
That’s all I’ve accomplished this week. With the final week coming up, I need to begin the inking phase for the comic panels I have finished thus far. During the end of the final week, I’ll have one extra blog post ready for the release of Chapter 3 and the final cover art. See you guys next week!
Here are those color rendering YouTube videos by the artist “Aka”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=shared&v=bOKxk1YtvsU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=shared&v=1T3RMNyvgrs
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