Book cover process Part I

Hello everyone! Welcome to my first official blog post. The reason I am calling it the first official post is because this post will be the first that adheres to the intended purpose for which I made this blog in the first place. One of my goals of this semester is to actively update my blog, post links to things I think everyone should see, and to discuss my artwork and the choices I make during the process. So here were go.

 

This is a painting I did in a studio class last semester. It is for a book jacket for a made up book called "The Creatures Inside". Here is the synopsis

"A city college has become the breeding ground of an alien invasion.  Brad and Emily have discovered the source and are racing against the clock to stop the invasion before the aliens outnumber them and control the planet."

Sounds exciting! my favorite thing about illustration as a discipline is encapsulated by this very project. Here is an idea and it's my job to figure out how to visually represent this idea in a compelling way that most people will find intriguing.

I started with a bunch of sketches, very... very rough sketches. My goal with these was to explore interesting points of view and compositions, just blocking in basic shapes and hints at value. Some of them just started as random shapes and weren't even intended to be anything in particular. I sometimes like to work with blobs and shapes that have interesting relationships with each other, and if a composition works well, I'll figure out what those shapes will be later.

I really wanted to have a composition that looked good and felt complete as a whole, but also as just the back cover and just the front cover. I settled on an idea (with some input from my instructor ) and developed a tighter version of what I had.

The drawing I went with suggests the discovery of the aliens and their breeding process. Aliens hanging people impregnated with their spawn is always scary, no matter how many times it's done. The idea here was that if a human incubator is hanging, where should the eggs go? Growing from the feet of course! Without the aid of a beating heart, eggs implanted in the human feet will be able to take advantage of gravity to deliver nutrient rich human fluids to growing alien embryos.

Part of the influence for this idea was that I could take advantage of only suggesting something horrific (hanging dead humans) without showing the whole corpse. There is something ominous about a body hanging from a noose and my idea allowed me to capture that eerie and morbid gesture.

A lot of the sketches are extremely loose, which is always something I struggle with, some days I find myself being more creative with lines, and sometimes with blobs (like a digital sketch that starts with an obscure shape). I don't really consider myself very good at drawing, and see my real strength as modeling with value. Either way, I like to work in as many ways as I can to explore, practice, and learn new ways of doing and thinking. This particular time, I chose a pencil.

Once I had my idea locked in, I was required to create a color comp, which I did in Photoshop. I only referred to my sketch observationally during this process (as opposed to painting over a scan). I did this for two reasons; The first was to save time, and the second was to continue to allow myself to potential explore more solutions without getting caught up with staying in the lines so to speak.

The blue lines indicate where the spine and flaps will be. This color comp, which are meant to be used as tools, is extremely rough but serves its purpose just fine. Something that I know I will need to improve however, is representing preliminary ideas more precisely.

The color palette I had in mind was a sort of slickly skin tone, warm light, and some sort of olive green. I think olive is just the best color in the whole world almost. At this point, I was starting to plan my final approach. I had to start considering props and photo reference, and possibly some inspirational reference also. Looking at a painting that has a feeling or aesthetic you admire can help greatly.

Above is a little comp I made to display the reference I took for this piece. It doesn't show all the images I took, but you get the idea. While I was planning the photoshoot, I was trying to figure out a setting, at first I was thinking garage, and something to use for the egg sack. I chose this wall, which is in a studio here at school, because it looks like it could belong to an academic institution. It also has the feeling of a storage room or a closet, which seems like a good place to hind impregnated dead people.

The egg sack was made from a water balloon, a plastic bag, and silly puddy. I shot everything I thought I would need. Using one egg and several photos of feet in the same position, I composted everything together to make an image (lower left of the above image) that contained everything I needed for the image, and also served as another preliminary version of my idea.

Next I created a drawing based on my photo comp. During the process of creating the first tight drawing of the idea I put a lot of thought into the position of the eggs, this problem got constant attention throughout the entire process and was continually refined. A major consideration I had was to keep them tightly positioned, but not allow the image to stagnate by allowing stale relationships to happen. This can occur particularly when objects that draw attention to themselves are directly horizontal or vertical from each other. Below is both the drawing and a version highlighting the relationships between the eggs.

The red lines indicate the relationships between the main egg stacks, which are going to be the ones that draw the most attention based on their illumination and placement. I have been obsessed with triangles as a basis for creating compositions lately. you'll notice that there are minimal horizontal or vertical lines (in blue) connecting any of the egg sacks, with the exception of ones that are only have visible, or all the way across the image.

I stare at this painting by Donato Giancola intently for inspiration all the time. There are endless teachable moments obviously, but the ones I want to dwell on are the triangular relationships created by important elements of the painting. I referred to this painting several times for decision making inspiration for both this piece and another I was working on at the same time.

So back to the point. I created this drawing from my photocomp. I drew it in pencil with the intention of scanning it and painting over it in photoshop. I did the first tight version (underpainting) so to speak in pencil to mimic the way I like to work in oils (wet mounting a drawing on masonite).

I left the majority of the drawing in lines only because the larger areas would be quicker to block in with value on the computer.

I am currently running out of time to keep working on this, so I'll just come back to it and make a part 2 which will show all of the digital work leading up to the final. Stay tuned.