Shenanigans & Tomfoolery

Or “potential cover” I should say.

A little more info on the piece after the break.

I thought of a bunch of different ideas for the cover: making the city (which is a big part of the story) more prominent, making it a story based cover, playing with text, with mood, but I ultimately decided that, for the first cover at least, I needed to be clear and to the point. To that end, I placed our two main characters facing directly at the reader on the cover and hoped that their attitude and posture would carry the piece forward. We don’t see Trini (girl on the right) in her “costume” until page 5 and we don’t really see anything of Ada (girl on the left) other than her head and shoulders until page 7 or 8 so I thought it was important to make it absolutely clear who our main characters are and what they look like right from the start. I had Frank Quitely’s popular Emma Frost cover from New X-Men in the back of my head as I worked on this.

I’m not sure if I left enough room for the titles but I’ll figure that out when I actually put them in. I could easily move the entire piece down a bit so I’m not too worried about that at the moment. What does worry are these girls’ palettes as I only thought very superficially about them in terms of color so I’ll need to figure that out on the fly. Another thing I found interesting is that the more I draw these two girls together, the bigger Trini gets. They were pretty much the same height when I first drew them in the first page and I kinda need to keep that in mind in the future. I don’t want Ada to end up looking like a little girl if Trini becomes too towering. There’s also one more element that I want to add to the cover but I need to see if I can make it work properly first.

Next up is coloring this cover and that’s it. I’m making copies of the five penciled and inked pages I have + the colored cover and a synopsis of the story and I’m off to the Big Apple Con on October 16-18 to try and sell this book.

I’ll post the color version of this cover once I finish it.

Related posts:

1. Hell’s Kitchen – Page 1, Color Test
2. In Hindsight: “Hell’s Kitchen” Part 1 – Story
3. In Hindsight: “Hell’s Kitchen” Part 2 – Artwork

Posted in Sketches |