work in progress - book cover

The illustration that I am working on now is for the book The Anatomy Lesson by John David Morley. The assignment was to create two book covers, one that relies on image and another one that's type-dominant.

The first step was brain-storming about the concept of the image. I decided to illustrate the novel's main characters as I imagined them, riding freely on their bikes through the antique streets and squares of Amsterdam.

step 1.

To loosen my hand and get some ideas, I prepared a couple of very rough sketches of things that popped into my head and started thinking about possible layouts.

I think of illustrations in layers, having the most important layer dominate the image. Once I came up with the general idea of the top-most layer, I sketched it out and began thinking about the background, which was to be the bottom layer.

step 2.

At this point, I have prepared the most important part of the image and started researching images for possible backgrounds. Since the novel was set in Amsterdam, I found a perfect picture I ended up using as a reference from a travel site. After sketching the background very roughly on a separate sheet of paper, I scanned both images into Illustrator and layed out the rough bookcover and printed out a low-res illustration to use as final reference.

step 3.
Taking the rough layout to a light table, I carefully drew out the entire image in graphite on a separate sheet of paper that I placed on top. The next step would be inking using my Micron pens. This step is great to do in a non-photo blue pencil because it makes for easier clean-up in Photoshop.

step 4.
After carefully picking up some of the darker graphite areas with a kneaded eraser I began using a Micron pen in size 02 to map out the lines and outline the shapes on the top-most "layer".

The next step will be erasing the graphite and scanning in and cleaning up the illustration.
Updates of coloring is to come in the following week.