SotD Concepts: First Cover Evolution (Patreon)

A while back I showed off the thumbnails concepts for the first cover. It took a while to nail down a thumbnail I liked, and then even after that making the cover was a roller-coaster ride.

First I filled in the background elements, the logo and the billboard style ads in the background.  I thought at first I could just make them an abstract thing to give the idea of a city. I made them all separate and in full color, even though I wasn't going to use their full color at first. That ended up being extremely helpful when I changed my mind later.

The first pass I did at drawing the cover didn't feel good to me. For months I could tell something was wrong, but I couldn't figure out what. I tried several different variants that still didn't do anything for me. (see below)

I became very frustrated with this. Eventually I decided it wasn't the colors or the style that was the main problem. It was the drawing of Sunday entirely and the abstract nature of the background.

So, I put in the work and redrew Sunday almost entirely. I mainly kept most of the lower half of the drawing, and made it so the top half of her was in better perspective with the background. I also went through the process of making the background an actual setting, buildings, billboards, and electrical wires.

Then I recolored it, and brought back the advertisement's true colors. Everything worked much better... well, almost.

There was one last problem. I still wasn't happy. Sunday's face just didn't work for me. I'm still to this day anxious about first impressions people will get when seeing everything for the first time. So, If I didn't like how she looked, it had to change.

I know this is such a little change, but I like the one on the right so much better. Something about the one on the left felt so dead and stale to me. I'm glad I did it.

So, that's how we got to the final cover! 

A lot of work for just one image.