Art to Book Cover Illustration Challenge

With my recent surprise book cover contract from Prise de Parole, I decided to register myself with Illustration Quebec. 

After a few months of very little activity on my profile, I thought, maybe I need more examples of cover art illustrations. So I decided to challenge myself. 

I am going to take my artwork, imagine a storyline relating to the idea behind the artwork, and illustrate a book cover for it.

I chose my most recent finished piece, Can I Have It?,  to be the guinea pig for this "experiment". When I took a step back from this piece, it gave me the idea of a pre-teen novel centered around a brother and sister going on a magical yet perilous  adventure after discovering a small magical planet.

I started with some messy gestural sketching to help me decide the layout of the book cover.

With the rule of three I drew the rough sketch.

Added a 2-point perspective guide to fix any perspective mistakes.

For the next steps, I started with the foreground and worked my way back. I worked in this order, clean line art, flat colours, shadows, lights and lighting effects, and finally textures.

When I finish an illustration, I like to take a step back, concider my original vision, and think of additional elements and effects I can add to take the illustration one step further into a truely finished composition. For Can I Have It, there was one element from the original artwork that could add much more drama to the scene. That of the reaching hands. I also added some contrasting lighting to focus the attention on the title and the children, and a subtle texture to bring everything together.

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THANKS FOR YOUR SUPPORT!