Color Sketches and Alternate Covers (Patreon)

     I mentioned before that the point of thumbnails is essentially to save time; here's an example of saving time on the thumbnails themselves. On the top row are a couple of alternate takes on a Boneyard cover, neither of which were used. But if Nessie and Glump look familiar in the first one, take a look at the second uploaded pic. That's the one that I chose for the actual cover. I wanted to see how it would look if they were being "chased" by an explosion from below, but I didn't want to redraw the whole thing. This was well before I possessed even the rudimentary computer skills I do today, so I had to do it the old fashioned way. I created a cutout around the characters, colored-in a very rough explosion and debris, sandwiched it between two layers of frisket film, and hinged it with tape so I could lift and lower it to compare the two versions. (You can see the lifted overlay in the second photo.) I did not change the rim-lighting on the characters to reflect the orange lighting from the explosion, because it wasn't really necessary. I pretty much knew where I was going at this point. So that's one way to save time while you're saving time; what we insiders like to call a "time saver" (sorry to get bogged down in jargon).