The Explorer's Guide to Making a Cover: Part 1

The Cover Drawing

When I began work on The Explorer's Guide to Drawing Fantasy Creatures, I already had an inkling of what the cover should look like. I was fond of the idea of a wrap around cover featuring all, or at least as many as possible, of the creatures that appear inside the book. I wouldn't be telling the truth if I said I wasn't inspired by the cover to Capcom Design Works. I love the energy and fun of characters crammed together, moving across the page. There is always something new for the viewer to discover. This was unlike many of IMPACT's other cover designs, but when I proposed my idea to my editor and the designer, they were excited about it and told me to go for it.

The cover was the last piece of art I had to do for the project after completing all the interior art and the manuscript. It was to be a wraparound cover for an 8.5 " x 11" book. I wanted to do the cover painting at least 150% larger* than the print size, but that posed a problem with the many differently-sized creatures marching across my composition. The heads of the largest creatures (the forest behemoth and flying fish) would be massive, requiring detailed coverage of a large surface area in relation to the rest of the painting. The smallest creatures would still be tiny and not allow for all the detail I would like, unless I did an image that took up an entire sheet of 22 x 30 watercolor paper.  Since I also had a deadline to consider, and I knew transferring, scaling up and re-drawing the image, and finally painting it would be too time consuming to finish in time, I decided to try something new. I would draw and paint the illustration in separate layers, scan in the pieces, and use Photoshop to digitally complete the painting.

Initial thumbnails for the cover

While the idea remains the same in each sketch, I was trying to work out the best way to fit all of the creatures into the allotted space and still leave room for the title. As you can see in all three of the above sketches, I didn't do a very good job at leaving room for type!

The chosen one

We went with #2, and I moved the flying fish back behind the other creatures to create some blank space at the top right-hand side of the cover for the title. I was able to leave the left side of the image, which would become the back cover, as-is, with the understanding that much of it would likely be covered by text.

Rough study of the cover with guides and bleed space.

Using Photoshop, I blew up the cover thumbnail to the size the cover would print on the book. I printed the image, and overlaid tracing paper to rough out the drawing. At this stage I wanted to develop the poses and positioning of the creatures, drawing them to look more like the actual designs rather than their cartoony thumbnail counterparts, but I did not continue on to a detailed, final drawing yet. I knew it would be necessary to tweak the creatures to get them working within the composition. I did each rough drawing separately so that when I scanned them in, I would have many different layers I could play with.

The first part of the final drawing, with background layers finished.

Once I was happy with the way the rough drawing looked, I moved onto the final drawing. Again, I drew each character on a separate piece of paper so that I could make changes and move them around easily once they were scanned in. I used the rough gestures to start with, enlarged them to a size at which I was comfortable drawing, and with a lightbox and drawing paper overlaid, I drew each creature. For those creatures that I knew would be obscured by others in the final art, I only detailed out the parts that I expected to be visible in the final.

The chimera layer

The sand dragon layer

Minotaur and marsh nymph layer

Sphinx layer. I ended up drawing a lot more of her than necessary!

The final cover drawing, with all the layers of creatures put together.

Once each drawing was finished, I scanned them all in and positioned them within the composition. By placing each creature on a different Photoshop layer, I was able to make any adjustments needed to their size and placement. Before I moved onto the final painting, I scaled down the entire group of critters to better fit the dimensions of the cover.

Click to see an animated GIF of the progression!

*It's usually a good idea to paint illustrations larger than they will print, because it gives you the freedom to fully detail the image. If your illustration is going to print small, you would have a  difficult time painting the details on objects or characters at the actual print size. Additionally, the reduction in size upon printing helps tighten up those details. One must be careful, however, about painting too much intricate detail on small areas of the artwork that will reduce even more upon printing. What might look good on the original painting could become difficult to read as the details meld together at a reduced size.


In Part 2, I'll discuss the final painting(s), and how I used layers and a little digital painting to combine disparate pieces of art into one finished illustration.

Post edited for clarity.