Now that it’s out in the wild, I’m excited to share the final artwork I made for the cover of Paving the Road to Hell, (Driving Arcana Wheel 2). This one was a long time in the works thanks to its size (18″x24″) and detail (click the image!) and the process used to create it took several steps.
The first stage was the biggest, and involved drawing up the whole thing on a giant piece of paper with a bunch of pencils. I used graphite pencils of varying softness, ranging from 2B (for lines and fine detail) to 9B (heavy darks) and a lot of smudging and lifting. The end result of that is an original currently hanging on my wall, and it looks like this:
To get to this stage alone took several months of work, as I had other projects going on at the same time. I then scanned it in in sections, since the paper is larger than even my sizable flat bed scanner, and stitched those sections together in Photoshop. I also did a little level adjusting, to account for glare from the paper which had warped under heavy application of graphite.
The next step was to begin adding colors, which I did using a bastardized version of the “sandwich” technique I saw John Picacio demo at World Fantasy waaaaaaaay back in 2009. As I recall John had this really great method for using color based off of actual oil paintings he made and other things but my process is more of a “mess around in layers and masks and modes until I get what I want.” Which in this case was two things: 1) I wanted the final image at the top of this post for use as the Wheel 2 wrap-around cover, and 2) I wanted an alternate version that I would then chop up and use for the individual Rotation eBook covers. Which version looks like this:
When I went to slap the title on the artwork for the wrap-around cover, however, I discovered that the detailed, high-contrast artwork didn’t support the information-heavy text, and so I created yet another version of the colors, which intentionally “flattened” the image, allowing the text to pop out in such a way that readers could, you know, actually read it. This version on its own isn’t what I intended, but rather what I needed in order to get the cover to work. Here it is in full without text:
And here is the front cover, with text, for comparison:
All told it felt like making this cover took almost as long as writing the stories for the book inside… even though I know that’s not true. But it was a great learning experience, and one which will definitely inform my approach to future covers—especially the one for Wheel 3, which will be done in the same style. Hopefully the things I learned here will help me do Wheel 3’s cover in less time, and therefore cut down on the time readers have to wait for those stories.
I hope you’ve enjoyed following along this snippet of my publishing process. You can find more about the book, including where to buy under various formats, at Heliopause Productions, and you can read more about the Driving Arcana saga right here.
Finally, have some detail shots!
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