Elder Scrolls Women's Day Zine - Cover Process (Patreon)

First of all, if you've not yet checked out the Elder Scrolls Women's Day zine, do so now! 

While I had been hoping to get someone else to do the cover, it ultimately didn't work with the timing and budget, and therefore I took the task on myself. After messing around with some more abstract imagery, I decided pretty quickly that the best way to honor and represent the wide variety of women characters in the Elder Scrolls would be to literally just show them. From there, I then decided to not show anyone who already had a piece of art or writing in the zine itself, and decided that these would all be characters who we've seen in game, so that they could all be recognized by a sufficiently well-versed fan. Going from left to right, bottom to top, we have: Almalexia, Urzoga Gra-Batul, Iszara, Khamira, Barenziah, Delphine, Astrid, Heita-Meen, Karliah, Captain Renault, Lyris Titanborn, and Tamika in the very back. 

 I compiled screenshots (some mine, some taken online) into a composition that I liked, drew all the ladies, and then printed the lines on some Canson Mi-Teintes pastel paper. I didn't lighten the lines at all, as I knew I'd be using opaque gouache.  

The next challenge was color scheme. I'm not terribly good with colors to begin with, and with the amount of different colors represented in the reference images, I was worried that the piece would end up looking disjointed. To combat this, I went with a limited palette roughly based on the Zorn: permanent white, yellow ochre, cad red deep, and payne's gray (instead of ivory black). I made a little test sheet of swatches to make sure that I could get everything I needed, and then started coloring. Since I didn't want to cover up the lines and base color of the paper entirely, I used the gouache in a watercolor like fashion at first, going thicker with later layers. 

After the initial colors were complete, I let the whole thing dry and went back in with payne's gray for the thick outlines. I used a thin Micron pen to pick out the final details, like eyes and mouths, as well as touch up some of the lines. Here's the final scan: 

Afterwards, all that remained was tweaking the values in Photoshop to better represent what it looked like in life and add some additional contrast. I also threw in some gradients to make each character stand out from those around her. You can see the final piece at this link.