Wednesday, April 16, 2014

GHOST #3 Cover Step by Step

Here's how I created the cover to Ghost #3, out this month from Dark Horse. Written by Kelly Sue DeConnick and Christopher Sebela and Geraldo Borges.



First thing was to come up with a cover sketch. These are sketches I submitted to Editor Patrick Thorpe at Dark Horse - drawn at 2x3 inches in my sketchbook in pencil and pen and then cleaned up and colored in Photoshop.



I started penciling the cover  with light blue and HB lead on 12" x 18" Bristol Board.


Almost finished pencils.


A few more details and cleaning up - final pencils.


Rachel Dodson's initial inks on the cover

Rachel uses Windsor Newton Series 7 Kolinsky Sable #2 Brush and Higgins Black Magic ink to ink the covers with.


Rachel's final inks…then the art is scanned and cleaned in Photoshop.


The first stage of coloring is to have the art "flatted".
Flatting allows the colorist to choose an area to color at any point throughout the coloring proces


My initial rough in of the colors, done in Photoshop CS3 with a Wacom Intuos Graphics Tablet. This is about a half hour.

I used warm foreground colors and the cool greens in the refection to separate.


Refining colors and begin turning black lines into color lines.


The final colors - I added Ghost's reflection to the window and turned the villain from Black to Dark Green to help the illusion of depth.

This ended up being my favorite image of Ghost I ever drew and as it's the last cover I'm doing (for now) - I was very pleased to go out on a high note!

The cover is out in stores starting today!

You can find this comic at your local comic book retailer


Enjoy!

TD






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