Cover Artwork Reveal - Wings of Fate

This.

This image right here represents the culmination of a very long and very arduous battle for me. I can't even begin to tell you how long it took me to paint this, and that was after months of struggling to come up with an acceptable sketch concept. I can already see several things I need to fix on this image, as well. I welcome constructive critique, if you would like, as this has been a huge learning project for me.

So yeah, you already know, but this is the cover artwork that will be used for the new edition of Wings of Fate. Yay! I literally had to dig my old and seriously cantankerous laptop out of cold storage in order to get an internet connection through my phone (which is slower than dirt) so that I could post this. I can already smell that the laptop is overheating, which means that I need to wrap up this post shortly and get it posted, then shut 'er down. But don't get me wrong, I'm just happy to have a machine that can connect to the net at home :)

So my goal was to have this image totally finished and uploaded and everything by last Friday, which was when I had surgery. Yeah, obviously that didn't happen. I've been working on it since while hopped up on painkillers and recovering, and am now to the point where I am adding all of the pretty text to prepare it for printing. Like a boss.

As soon as I post this, I'm off to scan the updated Legends of Destiny logo so that I can color it and slap it on the cover, then finish tweaking one of the interior maps that somehow escaped my attention until a week ago. Hopefully I don't have to fight with my other laptop too much to get that part done, because seriously, there were some heated words being exchanged during progress on the cover image.....

This, that, and the other

Good evening,

The second read-through of Wings of Fate is officially finished, and I am now in the process of formatting the manuscript for print. I had about a quarter of it freak out on me last night and convert everything to italics, which meant spending another hour and a half going through and un-italicizing the chapters affected, then hunting through it for all parts that *should* have had italics. Ugh. And last week I lost one of my notebooks that had several maps and pages of notes for future writing projects in it, then found it again several days later. It really was a miracle. The woes of a writer, lol.....

There's one week left until the deadline to get your free eCopy of Wings of Fate! Don't forget to send in a picture of your original copy of the book to cash in on this offer.

Now that I have the manuscript set up, I'll be focusing primarily on finishing the cover art and making sure that any maps being used are ready and inserted into the book. It's crunch time, and it's oh-so-exciting! Here's a sample of what I'm working on:

I have most of the details sketched for the cover, so my next step will be to start laying down the base colors and then proceeding to work on highlights and shadows. I'll also be designing font to use for the title and checking the image parameters against a template for the print size of the cover.

At this point, I'm still tweaking some things in the sketch and finishing with some detail. This has easily been the most challenging cover I've done to date. Hopefully I can wrangle it to look and feel how I want within the next week so that I can upload it and order a proof copy of the book. Wish me luck :/

Feedback Requested!!

Greetings, all. Things have been very busy in my corner of the world. Between lots of work and personal struggles, I have been doing everything I can to complete the revision process for The Rebirth Trilogy.

Cut the chatter, onto the art work! Below is my current WIP for one of the cover pieces I'm working on. I would very much appreciate some feedback on this piece :) The marching figures are indistinct because I turned up the opacity for full so that their color is fully visible. I have been turning opacity of each layer down to around 35% and coloring over the top of the "guide" layer, since just making the guide transparent was a mess. Any odd white/gray patches sticking out are visible portions of the guide layer and will be erased.

What I am looking for: Critique on the lighting of this piece, first and foremost. I am also open to critique on the positioning of figures featured on the cover. Any and all constructive criticism is welcome! If you hate it, I would appreciate it if you tell me why, as that is far more helpful than just saying, "This sucks."

I have uploaded the image in all it's huge glory so that details may be more easily viewed.

Thank you in advance!

Accepted cover concept - Path of a Hero

Here's the final cover concept for the redo of the second book in The Rebirth Trilogy - Path of a Hero. This is the copy I will be working off of as I create a digital painting for the cover art.

I would like to have a final product that is of high enough quality for a large digital print I can display on my wall, so it may be some time before this image is finished.

This cover features the character Terezom, the Hero of the god Kem. In the background is an army of mixed creatures, which has to do with a particular scene from the book. Let the coloring begin.

Rejected Cover - Path of a Hero

I have internet!! (sort of) Hoorah!

Though I have not been able to make blog posts in the past several months, I have been making art. Currently, my main project is a re-do of the covers for my trilogy. This is a huge project for me!

Pictured above is a rejected concept for Book 2, Path of a Hero. This is a drawing of the character Terezom, and while I think it gave me the chance to show some of his physical details, it just lacks the pizzazz I'm after. So, it gets filed away in my sketch folder.

I'm hoping to track down the software for my scanner without too much trouble. FYI, two halves of a software CD do not, unfortunately, make a whole. At least not so far as the CD reader is concerned :/ I would much prefer to scan these concepts into the computer, rather than taking pictures. the quality is just so much better.

Cover redo concept sketch

Just a sketch for an idea I'm toying with. I've been wanting to redo the cover for one of my novelettes, Taloner: Reima, for a little while now.

Old book covers

Heya! Long story short, I'll be moving in less than two weeks. This means packing. Ohhh so much packing..........

While boxing up my personal library, I ran across the original printed format of my trilogy. I'd forgotten how much I loved the images that I hand-drew for these binders, which I loaned to a few friends to help me with proofreading and constructive criticism. This was all prior to any self publishing, and I also wanted the binders for my own personal reading, since I didn't have another hard copy version. I am amazed that I was able to finish these by hand, as backgrounds were a very difficult feat for me at this time. I can see where I've improved, but I still love the artwork. These were done between 2005 and 2008, I believe.

Here are a few of the covers:

This first one was the front cover of my second book, Path of a Hero. This was created before I changed the title from "The Path of a Hero", due to title length limitations. This featured Terezom, one of the book's protagonists, riding his wyvern, Gryphon. The city Doomherald can be seen in the background, as can a small silhouette of Illiya, the protector of the city.

This second image was the back of Path of a Hero. It showed Lotus, another protagonist, riding on Illiya as they launch into the dawn to fight an invading army.

This last image was the back cover of Eternity's Edge, my third book. It depicted the hands of Kuma, a protagonist in the book, as he reached out to take a very special relic glowing with magic. This image was tied heavily to a key part of the book and the first line of script on the cover, which read, "Your will determines everything", a direct quote from the trilogy.

Images are copyright me, W. A. Johnson.

Wayside Tales cover

Here's a cover image I completed a while ago. It's for the collection of anthologies I've been working on now and then, though right now the project is on hiatus for a bit. I've been more concerned with getting Nethbane completed before I focus so much on this, though some of the short stories in the collection are already finished.

The background in this is composed of two photographs, both taken by me and then spliced together. After that I just threw in some gradients to make the sky look all lovely and blue. The little figures were sketched out on paper and then scanned in and done digitally. I like how it came out.

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.

projects...

Just a little something I'm working on. I had finished this image several months ago, then decided that I wasn't happy with some of the lighting. I've been meaning to get to it for a while and today I finally did. I have to say, I'm having a lot of fun with it, now that I know a few new tricks to try :)

The top screenshot is of the version I'm currently working with. The bottom one is what the former coloring looked like with the intended background. See how the lighting on the gray wyvern just isn't working that well? It looks like he got kool-aid or something splashed on him.

The entire image will be used as a book cover for my current writing project, so I want it to be as spiffy as it can. And let me tell you, I lurvs the dark lighting with bright splashes of color!

EE cover original

The uncut image for the third book in the trilogy, Eternity's Edge. I was really pleased with how the color came out on this one, though I did have some difficulty in getting the wings to look right. I tried mirroring them and then didn't like how it looked, so I ended up altering different parts on each wing to try and may them look more individualistic.

This image is of the character Aphral. It may be a little harder to tell, but the view is actually of his back and the top of his head. The spot of color on the head was intended to be an opal, not an eye, and after some tinkering with the color, I had to select an oval region and fill it with a supernova effect. Originally, I had intended to leave the oval spot open in the white so that there was a hole - the center of the supernova in the background would have shown through and looked like the opal. It didn't quite work out that way, so I ended up doing two supernova's: one on the head and one in the background. Over all though, I think this one turned out like I wanted, particularly with the blur.

PoaH cover original

This is the uncut image I created for the second book in the Rebirth Trilogy, Path of a Hero. Same story here for starting as it was with the WoF cover: I did a sketch on paper and transfered it to the computer, then used the path tool in GIMP to go around and fill in portions with gray. I stuck with the same concept I used for the first cover, which was duplicating the layer twice and altering the color of layers 2 and 3, then using the blur feature and adding lighting effects.

Something I did differently here was to add an additional layer of colored detail (the green and silver swirls on the wings and body), something I did not do with the other two covers. I liked the figure very much in this image but the detail didn't seem nearly as snazzy as the first cover image, so I was trying to help spice it up. It didn't come out quite like I'd pictured it, but I still think it was alright. Unfortunately, the best parts of the detail, in my opinion, ended up getting sacrificed when it came time to crop the image down for the cover template.

This image is intended to be of the character Terezom, hence the gray color and robe. The ball of green light in his hand is supposed to look like a magic spell, which might be obvious. The theme I decided on for each of the three covers was the three Heroes; the cover of each book features the respective Hero that is introduced at that point in the story. I liked this theme and it worked out well for both the story and cover designs, as it gave me something to help bind the art of the three together so that they were more relevant to each other. I also enjoyed developing this style of art, even though it takes a while to complete with eyestrain involved. It allowed me a lot of space to play with the flow of lines in a 2D kind of way.

WoF cover original

I figured that to get things started with, I'd begin with something fun. This is a larger version of the image found on the front cover of Wings of Fate. I somehow didn't manage to save the entire image in its non-text form, but I did manage to retain this one. At some point I might like to go back and attempt to re-create the effects of color and detail seen in this one, as I still have the raw digital file for this (ie, the one without all the cool lighting and blurring effects)

What I did for this style of art was to first do a crude sketch on paper to get the gist of flow and form needed for the body, then scanned it in and went around using the path tool in GIMP (aka the pen tool in Photoshop) to select large portions and fill them in with a base color. After that I duplicated the layer twice and altered the color of each. I believe the colors I used for layers 2 and 3 were sky blue and black, since they contrasted nicely with the original navy blue. These two were then merged together and blurred using motion blur. The gold sun spot in the corner was easy, as it was one of the Gflares available as a default. The background of the image was done using the lighting effects option, and I really hope I can replicate this if I go back and redo this image to get the complete thing again. Did that make any sense??

This particular image took a murderously long time to do, mostly because I was still new to the idea of using multiple layers and hadn't learned how to group things yet, as well as the fact that I was being super detailed with the path tool. I think I had it zoomed up to 200 or 400 percent for the majority of the time I was working on it. Still, I have to admit that the final result was extremely satisfactory and I love looking at this image. It is intended to be a semblance of the character Kuma with his spirit flames moving around him, though in this image his eyes are white, not the customary red. I did this to help it better blend with the background and try to give it something of an ethereal look.

Edit: Rough sketch added for reference :)