Tag Archive for design

Some More Raven Nevermore Cover Designs

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!

Up Next: Lone Stranger 8-Page Pitch

The next set of pages to be shown here will be from a small little pitch project done about 2 years ago titled “Lone Stranger”. You can gather by the cover what it entails, but more info is incoming. I will be adding “commentary” per page as it is released to share my experiences. They’re already all set up and ready to go starting April 4th, 2011!

I guess there shouldn’t be a “cover” to an 8-page story, but part of making a pitch involves making a cover. Here is the mock-cover for a pitch idea that was put together alost two years ago when I started this crazy journey into comic goodness!

I re-skinned this cover to match the Raven Nevermore designs. I figure… if I COULD make all my products have a similar design to brand them all a certain way, I would.

Cover Art by Emmanuel Xerx Javier. Post-Production Colors and Design by Nuno Teixeira.

Stay tuned!

UPDATE: READ 8-PAGE PITCH FREE

The First Four Raven Nevermore Covers

Here are the designs for the first four covers to Raven Nevermore. These issues will be printed at about the same time or weeks apart from each other and are setup to be the first half of the tale. Other covers will come later.

The artwork is by the series artist Emmanuel Xerx Javier with the design elements added by me. I’m also excited to have finally given titles for each of the chapters… I’m sure the literary peeps out there will easily discover what the obvious reference is :) . For the non-literary types… think back to an old Simpsons episode about Bart as a raven and you’ve pretty much nailed it!

New Project in the Works: Tyr Wyrmwood, Dragon Hunter

Well, I can’t contain myself any longer and I must put this somewhere. I wrote a script a few months back while taking a break from Raven Nevermore. I wanted something more episodic-based that I could come to here and there and tell closed stories with a threaded main arc–much like television episodes. The two day brainstorm and concept crunch document put together this baby: Tyr Wyrmwood: Dragon Hunter!

I found an artist via the web–I think on ConceptArt.com after seeing his portfolio–and reached out to him because I loved his dynamic line work and felt it’d be perfect for a new project of some sort… even though I had no idea what. His name is Giannis Milonogiannis, an artist from Greece, with a style I just had to have on SOMEthing. he has both a DeviantArt site and  Flickr gallery worth checking out. You can say that his art somehow influenced my brainstorm since I was back-and-forthing with him to iron out what HE would be interested in taking on before “Tyr Wyrmwood” was even figured out as a title and name of the main character.

He is an extremely quick artist due to his loose linework, very responsive and creative with design requests, and most importantly a positive joy to work with! The first issue was done in just over 2 weeks, maybe 3. It’s a 22-page black and white comic and I will likely letter this one.

I’m very certain I’ll be releasing this one free on the web somehow–not sure yet, but I’ll keep you informed! In the mean time, Giannis finished the cover and I tweaked it and did layout for what might be a final version… also, no idea yet as it’s still early on.

I just know I am eager to keep this one going. It’s a fun departure from the intensive “high concept” story threading that exists in Raven Nevermore.

PS: The above image is the SECOND design I tweaked after saving over the first one by accident with another file then closing Photoshop. Ya… noob mistake, but in the end I kinda like the second round better anyways. I’ll post the first as it exists only in jpg form now for kicks below.