Behind the Scenes: Making the Cover of Book 2 (Patreon)

For the first Cardboard Crack collection, I just used the Cardboard Crack logo for the cover (so far, WotC hasn't contacted me about trademark infringement, so that's good at least). But for the second book's cover, I needed to draw something new. There were also a lot of decisions to make because whatever precedent I set with this cover would carry over to future books.

The first decision was how to title the book. It's generally a bad idea to number books or put a year in the title. The reason is that it makes the books seem dated in the future, which discourages people from getting them. I also figured it was good to work Cardboard Crack into the title. In the end, I decided on "I will never quit Cardboard Crack." This was a style of title that I could imagine using variations on for future books.

Next, I started doing some sketches.

You can see that pretty quickly I settled on an image of a bunch of mayhem while someone continues to play Magic.

The next decision I had to make was whether to use color for the cover. I debated this for a while. On one hand, it would be a nice change of pace from the usual black and white comics, and I actually do like playing around with color (it's just too time consuming for me to do it on every comic--if you've seen my Bunny comics at bunnycomic.com, that will give you a sense of how I like to use color). On the other hand, a black and white cover could be more distinctive since most comic book covers are colored. In the end, I went with black and white, but I also decided to add more detail and cross hatching than usual to make it feel a little more special than just a usual comic. This actually hearkens back to a comic I used to read called Cerebus (FYI, the artist/writer of this comic eventually went a little crazy, so I hope this doesn't reflect poorly on me). In the collected volumes of this comic, the artist would do these amazingly intricate black and white cross-hatched covers that really stood out to me in comparison to other stuff you'd normally see at the comic shop.

Anyway, once the decision was made to go black and white, I started to sketch the cover in more detail.

As mentioned before, I usually sketch digitally in blue or gray. This way, when I do the final black lines on top of this, the sketch is light enough that it doesn't trick my eyes into thinking the artwork is too dark (which would cause me to compensate by doing the cross hatching more lightly).

Another aside, while most people who draw digitally these days draw right onto the screen, I actually use a really old tablet (almost 15 years old now I think) where I draw on a device below the screen so that I'm not actually looking at my hands as I draw. It's a little cumbersome, but you can get used to it with a little practice. Given how the price of things has gone down over time, I could probably afford a screen to draw on directly. But I worry that it might change might art style, so I stick with the old device. So stay tuned--eventually this thing will surely fail, so it will be interesting to see if it affects my art!

I then drew the final black and white artwork over the sketch.

Here it is with the sketch removed.

And here's the final cover with the title and logo added.

I hope you enjoyed this behind the scenes look! If you'd like a copy of this book, check it out here. Also, thanks for all the reviews on Amazon! It's really helpful (and also just an appreciated surprise) when people take the time to review my books.

Want to see how I color this artwork? Click here to see how!