Chapter 6 Cover (Patreon)

Hello again~

I'm going to skip over the elephant in the room and just jump into the process breakdown for this page (we can paint the elephant a nice color later)

I have been raring to get my hands on this chapter for a while! It's one of the chapters that required the most rewriting of all the existing chapters (with Chapter 4 coming in close second... you can read the original version of Chapter 4 here). Except for the broadest plot elements, it's required a significant amount of retooling of not just the plot but a lot of the characters as well. Since I was throwing a lot of it out, I had to figure out where the new chapter should be handled, and then how to reflect all of that new info in the cover. Chapter 3 introduced the weird dynamic of the smugglers Soli and Alamand and their pursuer Amen, and Chapter 6 will delve into that a little deeper. 

I posted this teaser last year I think, I was really feeling the off-balance composition and the harsh feeling of the spotlight from the window. Over the past year as I've refined the chapter I decided to just stick with this general feel

Next was fiddling with color and composition further to see if I actually wanted to commit, then sketching the final pose with actual effort

This was going along FAIRLY swimmingly so I refined it one level further and added rough colors just to tentatively see what it'd look like. At that point I realized the entire thing was way too brown, and that the little pop of blue wasn't really that strong compared to the overwhelming tan. My brain was like HM what else is blue. Oh yeah

I also added in dinky handcuffs which I'd forgotten to draw in... where I live there is, apropos of nothing in particular, a lock museum that is filled with a bunch of antique locks and safes from all around the world, run by a tiny 90 year old man who opens the museum for 4 hours a day on Tuesday and Thursday. I managed to walk by when it was open in 2014 and have had the ref photos sitting in my Chapter 6 folder all this time... felt so good to finally be able to fulfill their destiny lol anyway

Added some windows in but then had the unpleasant thought of, what kind of building has one window on one wall and then a bunch of bigass windows on the other wall? no glass? no way to defend? what if bugs fly in?? This was very annoying so I edited them down for the final version so there is still blue, and still a horizontal frame on the top and bottom, but it's not as in-ya-face. Then it was just a bunch of hand painting and photobashing some textures in and then painting on top of those, as you do, to reach the final. Some deetz I liked:

I think the image works better without the title slapped on it, but overall I'm happy with how it turned out! Really looking forward to finally being able to focus on this full-time in 2019~