Faux Book Cover Project - The Poison Pen

Watercolor, pen and ink and a heck of a lot of photoshopping.

Also, please ignore the fact that she has one big hand and one teeny tiny hand.  I'm going to claim that was an artistic choice.

Faux Book Cover Project Number 3 - Snow

The third installment of my fake book cover project.  I'm not bothering to make up author names and put them on the book covers; but I did leave space for it at the bottom of this one.

I think this one was heavily influenced by one of my critique group partners, the very talented A.M. Sartor, who recently completed this cover image: http://amsartor.com/30828/984501/folio1/the-phoenix-project

Basically, it's all about the hair, as usual.

Moray Eel Pattern

A repeating pattern of moray eels and a couple of fish.  I created this using this quite simple tutorial of how to create a repeating pattern: http://www.designsponge.com/2008/05/welcome-julia-and-how-to-make-a-repeat-pattern.html

My first repeating pattern ever! Yay!

Patterning and Silhouettes

I'm trying to learn more about creating patterns.. and I'd like to introduce more patterning into my illustrations. After creating the floral pattern and the one with the snakes and the birds, I started exploring silhouettes and ended up drawing all these fish (plus one narwhal). I may go back and color these in Photoshop and add some texture, but I'm not promising anything.  These are all done with brush pen on copy paper.

Things I learned:
1. I like to draw loopy things, like snakes, squid tentacles and eels.  This also explains my love of drawing hair and chinese dragons.
2. Narwhals, puffers, and cuttlefish are all super cute.
3. My goal this year: to draw things for fun.  I have been falling into the trap of "Is this good? Is this good?" and worrying about my illustrations so much that I sometimes lose sight of why I am doing this.  God knows I'm not in it for the money.  So, even though a pattern of snakes terrifying birds may be a bit odd, I enjoyed drawing it, and you know, I'm a bit odd anyway.

Faux Book Cover 2 - Twelve Thrilling Tales of Terror

Here's the next installment of my experiment in hand drawn type and book cover illustration.

This one is watercolor and pen and ink, assembled in Photoshop.

Faux Book Cover Project - The Oni and the Fox

Well, here's something completely different from me and not really recognizable as something I'd do except for the fact that there's a fox in it.

I wanted to work on my hand-lettering skills and my book cover design skills, so I had an idea to create some fake book covers as a personal project this year. With any luck, I hope to complete at least one a month, ideally many more than that.

This one was inked with a Pentel brush pen and Micron pens, and colored digitally.  It's been a while since I inked anything; it was kind of fun. Maybe I'll have to incorporate black outlines back into my style. We'll see.

Oni, by the way, are Japanese demons.