Hi everyone! It's been awhile since I've checked in, been very busy, but busy doing work that I'm happy to be doing. I still have a few digital paintings in the works, "Zorro X" and "Dark Queen Lillith", but for now I want to focus on the one of a kind book covers I've been working on. I recently submitted three new book covers, two of which have been accepted after the review, you can see them at www.selfpubbookcovers.com/Sam_Fontaine_Studios. But recently I've been working with a vector silhouette style. This piece is of a demon rising from the wrecked earth and it required more steps than my previous book covers because it started with a messy sketch to create the anatomy correctly, which was followed by filling in the larger areas with black to solidify the sketch.
From there I had to go into the small details and sharpen the lines using the eraser tool in Photoshop and to cut into the solid filled areas to make the background gradient show through the where the lines would be to show shapes more clearly such as muscle shapes and torso shapes. After creating the silhouette of the demon with all of the lines showing the background gradient, I exported the demon as a PNG (Because PNGs support transparency) and I imported it into Adobe Illustrator. Using the trace and expand functions in Illustrator I went through all of the lines and shapes and used the direct select tool to delete and to modify the anchor points that created the shape. By using these tools I was able to clean up and sharpen the forms and shapes to make it look more striking.
Cleaning up the design in Illustrator was the most tedious aspect of the whole creation process. Illustrator sometimes requires an annoying amount of precision in clicking the anchor points correctly and not only that, but the design itself had almost one hundred anchor points to either be deleted or modify.
Once the design was cleaned and sharpened up I, once again, exported it as a PNG file and reopened it in Photoshop. Now that the design has been sharpened and vectorized I began to layout the actual cover. From the get go, I knew that my design was going to require a very severe font to go with the demonic vibe, the font I stumbled upon was called "Morpheus" and I feel like it is perfect for the overall vibe of the piece.
I wanted to share a brief overview of how I designed this piece and I hope it gave you some ideas of your own for a digital art piece, or even a traditional art piece. Either way, go out and create something today :)
