Cover Me

A couple weeks ago, I was commissioned to design a book cover for an upcoming release by author Aaron M. Wilson.   The book was a collection of short stories titled “The Many Lives of Inez Wick.”  Aaron threw a couple ideas at me and I sketched out a few designs but I just couldn’t get a feel for it.  Then one night I threw a quick thumbnail down and I thought I was onto something.  Here’s what I came up with:

That weird scribble on the left side of the page is supposed to be a bike, as several of the stories involved a bike mechanic.

I liked what I came up with so I got to work on a rough draft.

I drew this quickly with marker.  I was really happy with where I was going.  I left out the bike because I wanted to focus more on Inez.  Plus bikes are very hard to draw.  I showed it to Aaron and got to work.

The first thing I did was lay out the page and do the title.

After that, I worked on the picture of Inez.  I inked Inez with a brush.

The rough draft and the penciled final design had her right hand resting on her arm.  I ultimately decided to omit the hand to bring more attention to her tattooed arm.

I was pretty happy with how things were turning out so I finished up the drawing of Inez.  The tattoos were done with a size 5 Micron pen and were fun to draw and I was pleased I got it right.

The rest of the cover was going to be crosshatched, so I got to work on that.

Then I was finally finished!

I scanned it into Photoshop and converted it into bitmap, then back to grayscale for the final black and white version.

I cleaned up a few parts and then converted it again so I could color it.

Soon I was finished!  I really like how it turned out.

More about the upcoming release can be found here:

http://www.soullessmachine.com/p/many-lives-of-inez-wick.html

 

 

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