Behind the Scenes on Book 7 (Patreon)

Here's a behind the scenes look at how the cover for my seventh book was put together. Typically the cover design process begins with choosing a title and a comic related to this title for the title page. In this case, I chose this comic for the title page:

The associated title I came up with was "Nothing gets between me and my Cardboard Crack." These sorts of titles, which include Cardboard Crack in some way, are sort of a play on the classic Garfield collections I used to read when I was a kid ("Garfield at large," "Garfield weighs in," "Garfield tips the scales," etc). Next, I started brainstorming cover ideas. I quickly thought it would be fun to draw some of the classic creatures from Magic, which is something I hadn't done on a cover yet. I wanted to do one creature for each color, and came up with angels (for white), merfolk (for blue), zombies or demons (for black), goblins or dragons (for red), and elves or hydra (for green). I never really considered a small creature for white because humans wouldn't look distinct enough in comparison to my stick figures. For blue, I didn't really feel like drawing a sphinx (I've sort of come around on this being their iconic big creature, but it definitely took me awhile). I wanted to include some goblins, and wanted a mix of large and small creatures (for composition), so this pushed me toward demons and hydra for black and green. This actually worked out nice, since I still had zombies available for my eighth book (although I obviously didn't anticipate a pandemic coming!). After a lot of work trying different compositions, I finally came up with this:

As I've mentioned before, I like to sketch everything in blue. I use this rather than gray or black, because it allows me to have a better sense of how dark my artwork is when I start inking over it in black. If I used gray or black for the sketch, it would make the artwork look darker, and I would go too light with the black line work and crosshatching for the final artwork. Here's what it looked like once I inked over this sketch:

It's pretty fun to get to do these more detailed drawings every once in a while for the book covers since it wouldn't really be practical for me to do this on all the comics. After removing the sketch layer and adding the title and logo, here is the final cover:

which of course is also available on Amazon. Hope you enjoyed this behind the scenes look. Let me know if you'd like to see more of this type of stuff in the future, or if you have ideas for other types of exclusive content you'd like to see on Patreon.