Nethbane Cover

Double-post Friday!! Oh my goodness gracious!

So a couple of screen captures of my working on this surfaced some months ago, and I figure that I'm far along enough with the manuscript of Nethbane that I can safely put up a final cover image. I had finished it before and then decided that I was really unhappy with the shading on the central figure, so I went back and reworked it and am now so much more satisfied. I think that the much darker shadows along the wyvern just really help to convey some drama. The red of the photo I used also complements the darkness nicely, and this is much more the image I had in mind when I first started sketching ideas for this cover.

The sketch for the wyvern and it's rider was actually done on a piece of 14"x8" paper and then scanned into the computer. I had to piece the wings together from there to get a single image, since the line work was bigger than the paper I was using. The shading technique I used here for much of the shadows is the method of using a solid black fill on a layer above the colors, then adjusting the opacity and erasing out places where I wanted more vivid color to show through.

The photo was actually taken without any filters, believe it or not. I just happened to be in a canyon during a summer rainstorm and was standing on a point during the sunset where I could see more rainclouds further down in a little valley. I love how vividly those colors captured. And I totally recommend Canon cameras.

One more little thing I'd like to mention: I tried converting the color of the author name at the bottom to a blue similar to the title, but it didn't look as good to me, so I stuck with red.