Ansgarde is the main character of DragonSky, a skypunk high-fantasy about a winged demon that dreams of freeing the dragons. Did I mention that she’s blue? Good luck finding a stock photo for that book cover. Ha!
Are you struggling with finding the right book cover for your fantasy story? I encourage you to try drawing it by yourself.
Ansgarde’s drawing went through THREE attempts. I won’t post my very first attempt, which was the first attempt to draw after many, many years of none. I also tried to color it with colored pencils. Let’s just say, the quality was as good as I could have done in middle school. I won’t expose you to that embarrassment.
But I didn’t give up. I put it away and tried again. The second attempt was much better, but the elusive art of shading was a mystery.
This would clearly not do for a cover. I had a lot to learn.
Enter YouTube.
I found a couple of how-to videos by amazing artists. It’s incredible how much watching a couple of videos helped me understand what shading is about.
I started the drawing for the THIRD time. The result was much better. I drew Ansgarde’s face differently and looked up some pictures of reptiles for the dragon’s skin texture. I plopped it into Krita to see how it would look colorized. I cut out around her and the dragon – a transparent mask. This gave me these cool dark colors behind them.
The result was pretty cool, but I could see a problem – my lines were too light. Ansgarde came out very washed out. Additionally, her wings looked rather boring. Come on, she had demon wings! They had to look cooler. I had to be bolder with my pencil – figuratively and literally.
You know what type of wings are not boring? Bat wings. Now, Ansgarde’s wings are just as cool.
I increased the saturation of the image once in Pages, and the colors popped awesomely for the cover.
Are there areas to improve this drawing? Certainly, but I don’t think I’ll be doing it anytime soon.
Who knows? Maybe I’ll draw these two for the fourth time?
