MAKING OF THE DEFOE 1666 BOOK COVER!!!

Hello again you lovely, lovely people! As promised, here is the making of the Defoe 1666 graphic novel cover out now from 2000AD!

I actually first submitted this rough cover idea waaaay back in 2007 after the first chapter of Defoe was completed. In my naivety, I thought there may have been a chance of it getting collected if I offered to pad it out with "bonus material"...what a tool I was...

As you can see, I thought it would be cool to have Defoe posing in a 17th century style portrait, holding a decapitated zombie head, with the chaos of the Great Fire of London behind him. Of course, this would mean that I would have to actually paint it somehow, but I figured I'd worry about that later.

Two years later, whilst in the midst of drawing Defoe "Book 3", I get told we're going ahead with the collection of the previous two books, and so dug out this old design which I thought could still be great if it worked out!



Here's the photo I took as a loose reference. I chopped off someone's head especially for it....

Below is the loose pencil guide I did. Bear in mind that at this point I still had never even attempted any "digital painting" and was pretty nervous about trying to make it pass for a 17th century style portrait.

This is the 80% finished version of the main figure. Luckily, I didn't have a strict deadline for this so I was able to take my time learning on the job, experimenting with different brushes in Photoshop.

I was having problems with Defoe's eyes--up close it looked great with the glints in his eyes, but when shrunk down, it gave the illusion he was cross eyed. Not really the look you want for a hard as nails zombie hunter...

I soon added the background of London burning, based on a famous painting by Lieve Verschuier (1630-86). As you can tell I also placed an orange overlay over Defoe to help him blend more with the fire in the background. Still not quite there yet...

I made various touch ups here and there, the most notable being the wig of the zombie head. I was struggling a bit with depicting realistic strands of hair, but by sheer luck I had bought the latest issue of Imagine FX, which included a new set of digital brushes--one of which was perfect for the look I wanted to achieve!

Next, I had to figure out how to do the baroque-esque frame. I spent hours online looking for a high res image that could be used with no copyright issues attached to it, but no luck. My lovely girlfriend suggested looking in IKEA of all places, and she was right!

So I purchased this cheap black plastic frame, painted HALF of it gold with a black ink wash, and took a high res photo of it....

Next I imported the painted half of the image into Photoshop, manipulating whatever I could, deleting elements and adding bits here and there to make it look more "fantastical".

I then sculpted a skull face out of regular modelling clay, painting it to match the frame....

Then the magic happens...I copied the half frame, flipped it, joined the two halfs together, pasting the skull face at the bottom.

I always knew I wanted the background wall to have some type of texture to it. I ended up using a stipple effect with the "dodge" tool in Photoshop. I also blackened out some areas of the frame using the "airbrush".

And at last I get to join the two elements together and pray that the bloody thing works! Originally, I added a "canvas" texture to the painting, giving it a more authentic look, which i thought worked really well on screen. Unfortunately, I discovered when I did a test print, the canvas texture distorted horribly for some reason, so I had to get rid of it. But I was still made up with how this final image turned out, considering it was my first attempt at digital painting and photo manipulation.

Finally, it was sent to 2000AD uber designer, Simon Parr, who added the logo and text. I'm afraid my awkward frame design probably didn't make it easy for him to fit in the logo, but I think it looks fantastic!

Right, that's your lot. You can bugger off now!

Catch you soon, and buy my book!!!

L