Images of Tomorrow Variant - Step by Step (Patreon)

To help celebrate Image Comics' 25th Anniversary they've been doing a series of variant covers. July's theme is "Images of Tomorrow" and the concept behind it is to show a possible future for your series 25 issues from now. I gave Steven Cummings a pretty wild description of a scene from a fictional Wayward #47 and he drew up a storm, then Royce Southerland colored the heck out of it.

I wanted to post the various steps this process went through here for you so you can check it out. If you haven't seen raw art files, prepared files for a colorist or final high resolution color files before, it can be useful to see what's expected in terms of quality and the various steps a cover illustration can go through.

Let me know if you like seeing these steps and, if so, I'll try to post more like this down the road.

 COVER DESCRIPTION:

Inaba is standing among the smoldering wreckage of Harajuku. It's not quite post-apocalyptic, but damn close. She has a fancy eye patch over one eye and is wielding a wakazashi. Her outfit is bloody and dirty. Beside or just behind her is Shirai. He's now a ghost with a glowing golden eye in the middle of his forehead. His regular eyes are blank with no irises. The bandages he wore when he was alive now spill out around his spirit like tangled ghostly threads. Around Inaba's feet we can see 8-9 cute yokai toys that are alive, a creepy toy army working with our teens (they're Tsukumogami brought to life by Ohara). They should be cute toy versions of our kitsune, kappa, and tengu.