Let's Get Technical

Want to know what goes into making a book cover? I remembered to record (most) the stages this time!

1. - 2. Taylor is a friend from fandom and you might know her as serpent_and_sage (author of the Dramione fic Seek and Find). She's familiar with my work so gave me lots of freedom. The brief was "make it sexy". We wanted something just tame enough to sneak past censors but still unashamedly horny (which is how we wound up with Tinkerbell being fingered by the Reaper). She sent me character descriptions and general vibes then let me loose! We started with these two sketch options.

3. - 5. Book printers like Kindle will provide a template once the book is finished. I use the template to format everything. The blue and orange grid doesn't come with the template. I make that for myself and use it as a ruler to keep everything centered.

I work in procreate, which isn't great for graphic design. It's missing a lot of alignment tools because, not matter what people say, it's not a graphic design program. But Adobe can get fucked and I'll just make my own tools.

The font is called De Alroy and is one of my favorites. I had to go in by hand and thicken a few parts. The ampersand is hand drawn. Once you've made sure it's free of typos remember to always rasterize your text.

Note that I didn't bother drawing most of the Reaper's (left) body and didn't bother with the Grim's (right) legs. I knew these were going to fade into the black background, so I didn't waste time adding detail I would eventually cover. It took me 20 years to learn this lesson.

6 - 9. These aren't perfectly in order because I forgot to take Always start with environmental shadows! It took me too long to figure this out. I brushed in a nice mauve color with a large soft airbrush (50% opacity) on a hard light layer to create a subtle vignette. I used the same mauve to darken the shadows around the clothes I didn't bother drawing.

To make glitter clothing: Choose a dark base color (dark, bluish green in this case). On a new layer, brush in sparkle with the primary color you want using the glitter brush (bright, mid tone (kinda neon) yellow-green). Adjust the base color until it looks right. Add a hard light layer on top grab a desaturated version of your main color (dark grey-green) and a 50% opacity soft airbrush to add in some shadows. Grab whatever you're using for your overall light (a pale yellow in this case) and brush in some highlights on an add layer.

10. - 11. Color like a motherfucker! You know what to do. Color as normal, don't forget to add highlights for some DRAMA. I like using the shale brush on an add layer for some hits of white. It adds light and a little textured crunch.

Add some shadows to cover up the things you didn't draw. Shadow daddies are handy for this.

Add a gradient to the text because everything looks better with a gradient. It's the easiest way to make something look fancy.

Overall this took about 9 hours of drawing and proably 2-3 hours of research.

If you're interested, I'll be a little more intentional about saving my progress and make a better step-by-step next time.