I’m not yet through fooling around with options for the design of Raven Nevermore #1. A couple things came to my thoughts while working on this. The first was that my line scanned in was just too too thick and would have to be re-drawn at a larger scale and more detail added.

Second, my thoughts kept going back to one of my biggest inspiration artists: Dave MacKean. I always loved that he could put a cover together without referring directly to the subject as a figure. That’s always been one of the main goals I wanted to tackle with the Raven Nevermore covers because I make use of so much symbolic stuff threaded into the plot. Non of it is directly ESSENTIAL to the plot, but for those interested in catching the subtle things, it’s filled with treats.

Other artists I can’t get out of my head for different reasons are Ben Templesmith (30 Days of Night, Fell, an others) for his use of layered textures to create backgrounds and convey feelings, mostly those of creepiness and supernatural horror, and Jock (Losers, Scalped, and others) for his very clean, strongly graphic design, covers that always seem to capture a very artistic composition.

Anyways, here’s a few more examples of my cover design process. It’s taken on another layer of importance for me because now I’m focusing on what the look and feel for the entire series should be based on my final result.

Here’s where I focused on just creating a rich background to work with. Total win on those birds as a Photoshop brush… awesome time saver! I ended up liking this quite a bit and may even make a print of it for myself. AS a comic cover, it’d be quiet “unorthodox” I’d imagine… although, sometimes just THINKING that makes me WANT to use it for the very purose of breaking conventions. Alas, that’s another topic entirely…

Here, I zoomed in the figure, cleaned up the edges a bit just to see how it’d sit on the background. It became evident to me that for a final I’d definitely have to work larger and add more detail. I also realized that I’d have to add fuller colours. That’s when it hit me that this direction was not where I wanted to go. I wanted to attempt flatter planes of texture as much as possible for the cover’s direction. I’m not sure I can convey exactly WHY I wanted this… I think in my head it’s connected to the exploration of “layers” within the story itself–on a character level as well as on a plot level (and even symbolic level). In any case… it was time for me to explore more iconographic options.

My first direction was to try something with a bit of “silent eeriness”, something more simple and clean (except for the grunge scratches of course). I used the previous background for the pattern of a crow’s silhouette and kept the new background desaturated.

Aaaaannnddd… this leads to the most current incarnation where I went in the opposite direction and made it darker. This has the strongest appeal to me so far. I like how the layers worked with each other, I like the cityscape on the bottom third representing Cog Town (and even the Watchtower is in there), and I like the sort of “woodcut” look of the crow-man thingy (notice the dark claw?!). I added more bird flocks to the cityscape to add some perspective (even though it’s entirely a flat collage plain), and I added the dead tree and some grunge ink to the raven’s body to break the form up some more.

Will I keep going with these? Perhaps, perhaps. But it may be time for me to explore issue 2′s themes and see if I can create a cohesive visual flow with these!