For my first stand-alone title, The Fifth Era of Man, it was my thought to try something different for the cover artwork. Unlike previous books, I shied away from a more traditional painting, instead choosing to do a mixture of hand-drawn ink on paper and digital color.
Stage 1
At this point, the illustration is solid black on white, with no color. As you can tell, I did not fill in the horn and the crown of the head.
Stage 2
After scanning the image in, I used Photoshop to fill in the helmet with variations of grays to create visual depth. As you can see, the horn is now fully filled out.
Stage 3
Behind the main image is dropped three layers in Photoshop: 1) the metal texture, 2) a blue color field, a 3) a pattern of lines to approximate the Progenitor's written language.
As a part of the book cover.
