How I turned a marker drawing into an illustrated book cover art

I’m not just a writer. I’m a creative. I dabble in different types of arts and sometimes they overlap. It comes in useful when it comes to designing graphics for my books, such as book covers or promotional content. I do it all myself because I can, and I enjoy it. If I have the ability to create my own book covers, why shouldn’t I?

The other day I crossed a new milestone. I’ve created hundreds of book covers by now, but this one is different because I successfully used my marker drawing to create a book cover artwork. I’d like to share with you the journey, the process that got me from the start to the finished piece, and the decisions that went into this design.

At the risk of exposing myself as an amateur, I’m going to show you the truth of what happened behind the scenes to arrive at the final illustrated book cover. If you’re currently wondering if you’ve got what it takes to do the same, I hope that this post will encourage you to give it a try.

Some might think that a paper drawing is not the right style or quality art to use as a book cover image, but here’s a secret no one talks enough about: just like books go through multiple drafts and get edited up the wazoo, so can art. What you start with and what you end up with can be far apart.

Art is editable

I believe that there is a glass ceiling when it comes to art. There is this misconception that you either have the mad talent to create masterpieces or you don’t, and that’s it for your hopes and dreams of being an artist. If beautiful art doesn’t just magically spawn from your talented fingers, then you’re not a true artist. Well, I call that a load of detrimental bull. This is the reason why so many people don’t even try, or they give up before they have a chance to improve.

I was in the latter group. I liked drawing as a kid, but I was discouraged because when compared to others, my skill came up short. My art taste was far more picky to produce art that was within my abilities. As an adult, I gave it a try again. I figured out several tricks of what works for me. Most important of them were:

1. Using references, and
2. Taking full advantage of my strengths.

While the first point is self-explanatory, my strengths were more elusive because, you see, I’m not one of those mad-talented artists who can cook up a masterpiece portrait for you on the city streets in mere minutes. I’m not an innovator with a unique style that sets trends and goes viral. But I’m persistent. Additionally, I’m an obsessive compulsive editor. And when I lean into those strengths, I can make up for my limited experience.

I wrote a new book this year, The Madman of the Woods, a vampire romantasy, and I wanted a cool cover for it. I don’t have a budget to hire an artist, besides, why hire someone when I can draw myself? I’m an amateur, but I’m not terrible.

I spoke about my art journey more in this post (in short, I’m learning how to draw with markers). The results have been pretty good so far, but a plain marker drawing, no matter how nice on its own, still isn’t good enough as is for a book cover, at least, not by my standards.

I tried to create a suitable drawing several times. You see, it couldn’t be just any drawing. It had to be something that would look good on a book cover.

Let’s start from the main characters: the titular madman, vampire Lailoken, and a supernatural bounty hunter, Josie. The initial drawings were mostly just for myself to get a feeling for what these characters look like and if they had cover-worthy vibes.

Lailoken’s drawing came out not bad but… Well, you can see. I tried to draw a background because I thought his silver hair would look cool on a dark background but I absolutely suck at drawing trees. So please forgive the cringy forest.

And here’s Josie, the supernatural bounty hunter. I’m proud of how cool the jacket came out and the face is nearly flawless. It’s one of my best drawings yet. Notice that I gave up on a background.

I tried to draw both of them too (the cover you saw above). That one was pretty good for a cover structurally-wise. it’s also very true to the story with what they look like and what they’re wearing. I was just not 100% convinced about it. A cover with that drawing just didn’t pop like I’d like it to. Thankfully, I had an idea for another drawing. I wanted to lean into the supernatural setting of the book.

I’m hesitant to post the zoomed out version of it since it’s far from pretty, but in spirit of sharing what things look like before you edit them, let’s show you my cringy trees again.

So, why two drawings? I knew I could draw faces, but I wanted something more than a face on the cover. I wanted a scene. I envisioned this cool scene where Lailoken’s coming out of the woods (that’s how the story begins). The red cape does not make an appearance in the story, but I wanted to color-code the book cover. More about that later. And I needed a large scene so I’d have space for my long title. However, I can’t draw a nice face at this scale. I’m just not that good at those fine details. I need to be zoomed in (both of these drawings are on a full letter-sized paper).

The face came out well. He looks a bit younger than what he’s supposed to, but it’s good enough. For the full-sized drawing I did better with trees than before but I grew frustrated with my marker collection since I didn’t have the darker hues I wanted. The woods look a lot lighter than what I envisioned (it’s supposed to be nighttime), but I love how the cape came out. That brilliant red is awesome. Btw, this red marker takes forever to dry. If you look at the close-up drawing, you’ll notice that I accidentally rubbed some of the red ink on his white hair. Oops. Lesson learned the hard way: protect the drawing from yourself by using a piece of wax paper.

Now comes the tricky part. How do you create a professional-looking cover art out of THAT?

Before diving deep into creating the cover art, I had to define what made an art good enough for a book cover. I knew that my drawings weren’t there yet, but what exactly did they need?

Looking for covers of published books online is usually a good start, but in this case, it didn’t give me as much help as you’d hope. While my book is a supernatural fantasy and a vampire romance—a quite popular genre with lots of examples online—none of the covers out there use marker drawings (surprising, right? /s). The first cover with a drawing I shared with you above (Lailoken and Josie together) was born out of that research. I tried to create a similar pose as some of those other covers out there. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have the same effect when it’s not a picture.

Then came a two-part trip to Barnes & Noble store, which gave me that final bit of inspiration. During the first trip, I was there shopping for a new vampire book (I’ve been binging through them lately as I’ve rediscovered my love for this genre). I’m sure that the store has hundreds of vampire books in stock, but I had a seriously hard time finding them. I expected the covers to make it obvious for me which book is a vampire story, but they were no help. I had to search deep and read the titles of everything on the shelves to spot something new to read. Finally, I found a vampire series ONLY because one of the books in the series had a “bite” in the title. The cover of the book I finally bought is just another of those covers with a hot shirtless guy. And it’s blue.

Blue.

No. Absolutely not.

A vampire book needs to be dark with bold red accents. That’s what would have made it easy for me to spot what I was looking for. I didn’t know how much I was leaning on that assumption until I couldn’t find what I wanted to read.

I returned to Barnes & Noble a couple of days later, this time with a clear goal of finding book cover inspirations. I’m very glad that I went there in person. Looking at books in person is a very different experience from looking at them online. When the bookstore’s staff curates the inventory and sets it up for me to discover it makes a difference because online search algorithms aren’t that good at showing you good book covers. Popular book link doesn’t necessarily mean a good cover.

The following web story lists notable cool book covers I found during that trip along with a breakdown of what caught my eye in each one. Do you like them too? Have you read any of these? Let me know in the comments.

I also found a few covers that use illustrations—very few. Illustrations are usually used for middle grade, YA, or for feel-good, lighthearted stories, and that’s definitely not what my book is. But they exist and that’s good enough for me. It gave me more fuel to keep working on this project.

I noticed that the illustrated covers used a different typeface than all of the other book covers that use photographs or symbols. In comparison, one illustrated cover I found tried to use a serif font and it didn’t look as good as the others. So while the fantasy books might have strong font conventions, the type of an image used overrides those conventions.

What are the focal points in my drawing? I think it’s two-fold. There’s the face, naturally, it draws the eye, and there’s the brilliant red cape (now you see why I chose a red cape even though there’s no such thing in the story). 

Faces, btw, are important. I apologize as I don’t remember who to credit with this advice, but look at some examples of book covers and you’ll notice the wisdom of it. Essentially, a book cover that just has an object or a scene but no people in it doesn’t draw eye as much as one that has the presence of a person. It could be a face or it could be silhouette, a hand, a shoe, SOMETHING that suggests people. Seeing it makes you relate to the person in the image, makes you wonder what their story is. It stirs curiosity and is the first window of opening to grab a reader’s attention.

First, I manually removed the background from the face drawing. I tried to do it with Krita tools at first, hoping it would do it for me, but that only created more work for me to fix (did I mention that I don’t know how to use Krita as much as I should?). Then I took that cut out and overlaid it on top of the full drawing to make the face line up with the rest of the body in a way that would anatomically make sense.

Later, I realized that my attempt at drawing longer hair was not working for me (the back layer of hair did not match the front layer), so I duplicated the face drawing cut out and cut out only hair out of it. In the end, I only used a little of that hair and drew a few strands manually.

Drawing hair took me the longest. After spending many, many hours, I decided that I hated it and started over. Then I found that my layers were a mess, and I had to undo/redo a lot of work. Lots of lessons of what not to do learned from that experience. As of today, I’m still not 100% happy with that hair, but I have to let it go.

I now have about 5 hair-related paint layers (not including the actual drawings). It’s a little more organized but still far from pretty. People who say hair is easy to draw… I don’t relate.

I added a pattern to his robes and darkened them, but otherwise, I left them as is. At first, that is.

While trying to avoid the misgendering issue, I revisited the structural look of his body and wondered if his torso was too feminine. I had to go back to look at some reference photos of men standing (do not ask me to reveal my search history keywords, lol). Finally, I realized that his waist was too cinched. Men standing in that position usually go flat down from the chest (or are rounded). I pushed his waist a bit to create a straighter line, and it completed the misgendering fix. Yay.

I loved the cape from the beginning, but something was bothering me about it. I looked up some more images of capes and finally realized that this type of cape should have had a hood. I was pleasantly surprised by how easy adding a hood in Krita was. Compared to hair, adding extra clothing pieces was a piece of cake. Yay.