Entreat Me - Steps

Remember this?

 

I got a shiny new computer built not too long after this was completed and I finally pulled the last few folders off my backup HD and onto my current one - including the step-by-steps and notes I'd saved out for the progress post on this cover.  The author, Grace, has been posting lately that shje's on the home stretch towards finishing the manuscript for this book, so I figured it was a good time to return to it.

To start; thumbnails and experimenting with type and layout.  I don't use thumbnails as much as I should but they're definitely a must when working for a client. It also helps when finding a composition that works with the type treatment. Additionally, Grace and I are good friends but we each have different tastes in cover art, so what I might instinctively go for is not necessarily what she would like (for example, she prefers faces to be partially obscured or hidden whereas I am the opposite and have to fight myself not to show them off) .  Luckily she is very descriptive and provides tons of reference for what she wants and I try a lot of different options to try and incorporate her ideas.

The key things to include here are a medieval look, a dark moody feel hinting at the romance, the roses, a shadowy hero and a strong, elegant heroine. Grace was also font of several covers that used frames in the composition.

Grace and I picked out several things she liked from the first round of thumbnails, and I worked up three more detailed sketches.  The favourite was number 2, with a few modifications to the Beast character (as this was a romance, placing the man rather than the Beast on the cover created a wider commercial appeal. But I had a few ideas up my sleeve for hinting that this was still a Beauty and the Beast retelling).

Next up, adding colour, fixing anatomy and a little fashion design. With a fantasy setting, perfect historical accuracy was less important as long as the medieval feeling came across, so the characters' dress was brought together from many different references. Including many repeated oglings of the costume porn in The Tudors TV series. Oh the sacrifices we must make for art...

Louvaen's dress almost received a colour makeover but ultimately I felt the sleeves broke up the bold statement the pure red dress made. Entreat Me was going to be published digitally so I had to consider how the cover needed to attract readers in a thumbnail size on Amazon. Besides that, we had already agreed on a limited colour palette (both for the aforementioned thumbnail considerations and to keep the cover more moody and muted) and sticking to that meant most of my options for the sleeves either blended into the background or were too close to flesh tones, both of which made her arms look detached and odd.

Ballard's features received some sharpening and a lighting change, and his outfit picked up a few additions that hinted at his true nature in the books...

 

Finally the background was given detail and the rosebushes were added. I always find red a tricky colour to work with and it was a challenge making the roses appear luminous, silky and just a touch too perfect.

A few touches of rich, warm dappled light on a Soft Light/Overlay layer and the type treatment added back in as in the first image posted, and we're done!

WIP Wednesday & a blast from the past!

Dagger finished, started working out the mehndi  (yes, I usually start out with scribbles like this until I stumble onto a shape I like). Like everything else, I'm going for a shell/coral design, all whorls and swirls.  Listening to the How to Train Your Dragon soundtrack while I do it - music distracts my brain so I don't overthink the patterns too hard.

I also stumbled across something while I was tidying out some old folders. My high school sketchbooks used to take a real beating, being carried about to ever single lesson (for that precious 3 mins drawing time before the teacher arrived), to and from my friends' houses, on holiday, and pretty much everywhere else I went.  When we got a scanner I started "saving" some of the drawings I liked best by scanning them before the sketchbook fell to pieces entirely. I remember doing this while I was still in high school - about fourteen or fifteen, I think.  So that makes this at least ten years old!

Anyone guess what book they're reading? :)

WIP Wednesday (Bouguereau Study)

Study of Faneuse (The Haymaker) by Bouguereau.  Started while I was playing around with a friend's iMac (if I ever win the lottery...), never got around to finishing it.  It's not my favourite Bouguereau, so I'm in two minds over whether I should just suck it up and finish it or move onto a master study of a painting I really like.  At the Edge of the Brook, for example.

WIP Wednesday

Slowly but surely getting there. Finished flimsy transparent bits.  Begun work on dagger (many, many revisions and reworkings and deletions not pictured).  Added Very Important Sparkles.

It's technically an hour into Thursday here, because of a rather long day at work pushing a game app to the finishing line, and my boss treating us a late pub dinner and rather a lot of alcohol to thank us/celebrate.

(Look, I'm Scottish. You should be amazed I'm not tipsy every time I post.)

WIP...It's Probably Wednesday in a Parallel Universe, Right?

So last week's WIP did not go up on account of plague. I came home from work early on Wednesday, collapsed into bed and completely forgot about it, until somewhere around the weekend when I stopped feeling like the living dead. 

This week...honestly, I'm pretty sure it's still Tuesday and the calendars are lying to us.

Anyway, I've made a little progress on this. Not a huge amount, but some. I thought I'd show it without the rough details scribbled over the top, and a close-up to make up for missing last week.

WIP Wednesday

I'm a huge fan of Marina Bychkova's Enchanted Dolls. Every single doll is unique, and the costumes and accessories she creates for them are exquisite - she creates every detail painstakingly by hand, and there are a LOT of details!  I would kill to own one, but they justifiably cost a pretty penny, and are way out of my budget.  However, every year she holds a contest for her birthday and the prize is an Enchanted Doll.  One year, the challenge was to create a piece of artwork based on one of her dolls, and I jumped at the chance to enter.

Unfortunately while I was halfway through my painting, I had a surprise trip to hospital to have surprise emergency surgery on a surprise ovarian cyst.  Needless to say, I was out of commission for a while, and that deadline for the contest blew past me.  I was pretty damn disappointed, and never found the drive to go back and finish the painting.  But I still like it, and still want to finish it. After all, there's no reason why I can't send it to Marina as a little token of my fangirlism, contest or no contest.

The doll I picked to paint was Cinderella, but I planned on sneaking references to a couple of others in there.  The mermaid is the first.  The others I never got around to adding.  I'm pretty sure only die hard Enchanted Doll fans would spot them anyway.

This is the composition I eventually decided to go with.  Originally I started working on the one below, portraying the moment Cinderella approaches the castle, but something about it wasn't working.  There is still something about her posture and expression that I love here, but ultimately I decided to go with a different moment - fleeing the ball as the clock strikes midnight.  And yes, her dress IS supposed to have a top half. An incredibly complex top half that I wasn't even attempting to start until I was sure I had the underlying anatomy down correctly!

WIP Wednesdays!

The more time that slips away between blog posts, the greater the pressure. The next post must be epic.  Awe-inspiring.  Witty and dazzling in its brilliance, otherwise the long wait is completely unjustifiable.  Unfortunately unless someone is holding a gun or a paycheck to my head, my response to pressure is to run away into the arms of Tumblr or Pinterest, because checking out other people's pretty pictures is 1) vaguely passable as "research and inspiration" and 2) way easier than talking about my own.

It's very easy to succumb to inertia when your mental energy is low - which happens, and often, when you are lucky enough to work a job when you have to be creative for 8+ hours a day and then come home and KEEP being creative.  Then when your brain finds you again, suddenly inertia and bad habits are monsters that need to be slain. And then you need to write an Oscar winning blog post. And so you avoid it.  And then realise it was October when you last posted and there really is nothing in the world so awesome that you could realistically bluff and say, "Yes, this totally took me since October to write!" 

I probably could have summed up the above two paragraphs by saying, "Writer's block. Sorry." 

Anyway, I am so out of practice that I am not going to pretend that I am going to be producing rock-your-socks-off material on a weekly basis from this moment forward. That would be a fib. Also, I would probably never use the phrase rock-your-socks-off seriously.

But a weekly WIP post? I could do that.  That's a nice, realistic little goal. I can just throw up whatever I'm currently working on in whatever stage it happens to be in. If I haven't worked on something new in a week, then Thor knows I have a full "WIP" folder on my hard drive.  And it only takes a few minutes.

Plus, WIP Wednesdays has a fun ring to it.

If you've ever watched me on Ustream/Livestream then...you probably don't recognise this at all, because I keep changing it and it bears almost no resemblence to the original concept.  Mini-goal of the moment - getting this finished by the end of the month!

Entreat Me cover art

You may have noticed the WIP thumb I posted at the start.  I'm thrilled to finally present the finished artwork in full.  This is another cover for Grace Draven, who previously commissioned me for her novel Master of Crows.

Entreat Me is a Beauty & the Beast retelling, and from what I've read, is going to be an amazing read!  Grace has a knack for writing powerful heroines and memorable heroes.  The release date for Entreat Me is yet to be announced, but I'll be sure to let you know when it is!  Until then, you'll just have to enjoy the cover with my sig taking up space, since Grace's commissions have the dubious honour of being my most stolen pieces!

In the meantime, Master of Crows has recently been re-released for Kindle on Amazon and as an ebook on Smashwords, and this time Grace was free to use my artwork in the cover art.  Smashwords even lets you read the first 30% of the book for free, so go check it out!  You won't regret it.  Grace herself can be found on her blog (linked above), on DeviantArt and on Twitter.

Coming up next will be the steps and walkthrough of Entreat Me!

I love Game of Thrones.  I got hooked on the show and picked up the books halfway through - finally, so many of my friends' Fantasy Flight commissions made more sense!  This shot of Danaerys Targaryen from the series finale grabbed me so hard I just HAD to make a study of it.  The lighting, the composition, Dany's expression and the adorable Drogon.  There just wasn't anything else for it.

Just a quickie - about two hours in Photoshop CS2.  I made it an exercise in seeing colour and didn't let my pen touch the eyedropper. 

I'm working on a book cover right now, which I can't show until it's been approved.   Soon, though!  In the meantime, I've started a Tumblr after mulling over it for ages and stalking certain blogs.  It's not strictly an art blog.  I love the scrapbook quality of it and so you can expect to be subjected to a wide variety of my interests - crafts, interior design, fashion, far away places, fun photos, sappy inspiration quotes and the occasional fitness article.  I will post WIPs and sketches too, but the majority of it will be things that inspire me rather than things I make myself.   If that doesn't put you off, see you over there!

The Keepers - Progress

I thought I'd share the process of a piece that's currently still "In Progress". This is both to give you a glimpse into my process and to show you the pitfalls of overthinking a concept (there is a very good reason why this piece is still In Progress!)

It started with a rough idea, a half story, which was pretty much inspired by a lot of reading about the Muses, the Fates, and other creepy chicks who often come in threes and like to pop up in all the good myths and legends.

I liked the sketch phase, but when I started adding colour it lost something for me. I don't know if it was the poses, the cramped composition or something about the expressions, but I wanted something with a creepy and slightly threatening edge, and I wasn't getting it here. So I started working on a full length version instead.


Right away I liked this much better. I had the image of them being in a cavelike environment filled with these little round glass bottles full of dreams, which would be glowing with prismatic colours. And the three of them together would be bottling another one. I distinctly remember my friend Melissa Findley telling me not to overwork this one or I would lose the atmosphere.

(She was kind enough not to say "I told you so"later!)

I was happy with the poses, so I started refining the characters, trying to find a look that was creepy and dark yet beautiful and alluring. I had a very specific idea about the type of costume and makeup they would wear. They would be tattered and slightly fae-like, with a lot of different colours popping out of the shadows. I knew I wanted lots of intricate elements like jewellery and beading, but for these to look old and cobbled together, like these guys are human magpies. And I absolutely knew I wanted very large, brightly coloured eyes peering out of dark, sooty eye makeup, luminous golden skin, and dewy pink lips and cheeks.

At this point I also started to refine the background, and right away I could feel I had lost a lot of the texture and atmosphere. But instead of doing the sensible thing like, oh, going back to a version that had actually work, I tried to inject more life in by adding the candles as a new light source and to start giving the scene a more lived-in look. I thought by indicating a big hole in the back wall I could make the area look cavelike again (it didn't work!)

I was also struggling the capture the feel of the costumes, so I opened up a fresh canvas and started sketching the concepts. It didn't matter that the poses wouldn't show everything I designed. I just wanted to find the look I was after without being constrained by the characters' body positions. Besides, I'm a concept artist by trade and fashion design is one of my favourite parts of my work.

And this is where it all really starts to go wrong!


I love the look and feel of the characters, but I have no idea what the standing character is doing now and I can hardly remember what I was trying to do with her pose. I think she was supposed to be dangling something from her raised hand. I've brought more candles into the scene and start to add hints of books, paper, artwork. I believe I was thinking that since their faces are smeared with paint and kohl that they can be some kind of fae muses or artists, but some old books and twisty candlesticks do not a goblin cave make! I've lost the ethereal weirdness and atmosphere of the original sketch. I open up the background to try and bring back a sense of space, since no matter how much I enlarge the canvas, the scene feels cramped. It just goes to show that a bigger canvas can never make up for poor composition.

So that's where this piece is still sitting. I've accepted that I'm going to have to do one of the toughest things for an artist - scrap the whole damn background and start again from the beginning. And this time, I'm not going to leave the sketch phase until I have nailed the composition and lighting down, instead of jumping ahead and then trying to bandage up the mistakes as I go. Just a little bit of planning and forethought go a long, long way!