Picking up from where I left off yesterday, working on the cover for Sunnyville Stories Volume 1 was no easy task.
Once the colored ink used for Rusty and his stick & bundle had dried, it was time to redo the lines using black India ink. It was necessary to wait until the ink completely dried. Had I worked into the colored ink while it was still wet, it would have bled and I need clean art for my book cover. Anyway, for most of the lines, I used my tool of choice – a Speedball 513 nib. That is what I used for Rusty and most of the background. The thin lines in the back for the mountains called for a Hunt 107 nib, a favored tool of mine for really thin lines. This is the principle of atmospheric perspective in play. The farther away something is, the more faint it gets. As for the grass in the foreground, that was done with a sable brush.
"The Journey Begins", Ink and watercolor on 7x10 in. paper
As you recall, this image is the finished product. Prints of it are readily available on DeviantArt. As good as it looks though, a serious problem was looking me right in the eyes. This piece is 7 by 10 inches. The print size of my trade paperback was to be 8.25 by 10.75 inches. What was I to do? I couldn’t just enlarge the image. The integrity would be compromised and it would probably look like one big mess. So that’s when a clever idea materialized.
What I did was to take a piece of 8.5 by 11 inch piece of ordinary drawing paper (the type I use for many pencil drawings) and aligned the work against it. Then with a Uniball pen, I continued the line art of the mountains, horizon line, and grass in the foreground. Quite ingenious, don’t you think? From there on, it wasn’t hard to do the rest. I scanned my original artwork mounted on the paper into my computer. From there, it went to Photoshop and was touched up. The rest of the black in the foreground was colored in, patchy spots were touched up, and I added the title logo.
Sunnyville Stories Volume 1 Book Cover
Voila! There you have it. This is how I came up with the cover for Sunnyville Stories Volume 1. I feel that this image definitely shows the influence of Dave Sim and it captures the essence of the Fool tarot card I wanted to convey. This is the start of Rusty’s journey. In a way, it is also the start of my journey. Much like the Fool, I’m taking a big leap of faith with this work. Will I soar to new heights or fall into an endless chasm? Only time will tell.
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