EMPOWERED vol.10 cover art work stages (Patreon)

Since I did this work-stage dealie for the cover to the upcoming Empowered vol.11 early on in this here Patreon, thought I might as well start doing the same for previous volumes. Behold, the (many) steps of producing Empowered vol 10's happy-Emp cover! 

First off, the initial rough, which apparently would've featured other characters in the background and an ID card in the foreground:

Then, the same rough, but sized correctly to the printed version, with Empowered logo added: 

Then, the finished pencils, which were drawn with an H lead and actually quite faint, so I jacked the Levels up in Photoshop to make 'em visible to you:

Next up were the inks, done with (I think) a Japanese Zebra "maru" quill-type pen-tip, plus a Koh-I-Noor tech pen. (This might be the last time I drew a cover with those tools as, not long after this, an unfortunate shift in paper and ink quality made them effectively unusable.) As you might have figured out by now, the neon sign was not gonna be drawn by hand.

Then came the ol' color guide, emailed to eventual colorist Rob "Robaato" Porter.

Graphic designer Eugene Wang, who created the great Empowered logo, sent along the base text for the neon sign (though the subtitle wouldn't make it into the final cover):

And here's another version of the sign, with some "lights" I crudely Photoshopped into the Super Homeys logo:

Et voila, here are Rob's final colors for the piece, with the text for "...FINALLY" added at the last moment, as I recall: