Nightcare Variant Cover (Patreon)

My pal Scott Fogg just launched a campaign for his new super hero comic, NIGHTCARE, and asked it I'd draw a variant cover for it. Great characters (all designed by another pal of mine, Mayday Trippe), a really fun team dynamic, and catching me at juuuust the right time in-between projects made this a blast to draw. You can back the comic right now (as well as get my cover above if you so choose).

The comic is a bit of an Adventures in Babysitting + Teen Titans + Runaways flavored story about parents (mostly super heroes) who drop their super-powered kids off at a nightcare while they go off saving the city. Of course, kids being kids, they're not going to let their parents have all the fun.

The idea I had for my cover gave me the opportunity to finally play around with some different brushes in Clip Studio. There's a sequence in the book where the caretaker, Pixel, creates this pixelated bridge all of the kids can move about the city on. For my cover, I wanted Pixel in the background doing her best to keep her responsibilities in line using those physical, pixel powers. This involved finding about ten different brushes in Clip Studio's assets that might work as "pixels." Mostly random square shaped stuff. I ended up tweaking about four of them, attached them to a spray tool, and "sprinkled" them in. I then warped the foremost shapes to give some perspective and worked with color to add and fade other squares to best fit with the composition. I think the whole process took longer than the actual coloring of the characters and I'll probably never use those brushes again! But I think the result came out great and as a bonus I learned a little more about Clip Studio's capabilities.

I uploaded the full time-lapse for those who want to see a little of what I just wrote. Heads-up though, it's about 15-minutes, so feel free to scrub through some of the more tedious parts.