Step-by-step : Grémillet Sister's cover coloring (Patreon)

Hello my dear Patrons

here goes the steps for the coloring of this image, the cover image of Grémillet Sister's second book.

I already told in a previous post abour the idea: ucing 2 colors, blue and warm yellow, and play with the contrast. The problem in a cover is that it has to be very clear even from distance (you have to iamgine someone entering in the book shop and you book is on a shelf some meters away ... yes, I think about this, I swear!) and very small (for catching the eye on an Amazon page !). So you have to limit the color palette. If it was a page, I would have done Cassiopée, the main character, more dark and blue, but the publisher asked me to keep her warm to "catch the eye of the buyer". Yes , this is not very "arty" but, the more books we sell, the more we'll be able to go on with the series :) so, if you love your characters, you have to be ready to sell them!

Anyway, I'm kind of happy about the result.

Technically, I always use the same technique on this project: I draw the illustration traditionally ( B pencil on Canson Mixed Media 200gr/m paper) and do the values with black watercolors (Schmincke). Then I scan , I try to clean a little the image without "burning" the values, and color with photoshop. The basic colors are a layer in Linear Burn + (dénsité linéaire +). I use muntiply to create some shades and Linear Burn - (dénsité linéaire -) for the lights. Plus some Color (couleur) layers to take away the grey tones.

Hop that's all :) ready for the next cover now XD

hugs

Alessandro