DRAWING ARMY OF DARKNESS BY SCOTT COHN
I start by laying out some cover sketches based of what the writer Mike (Raicht) and I discuss about the issue. Then he and I figure out what works best. Is the focus Ash’s possession by Hell’s Prophet, or Ash’s own teammates coming to terms with having to kill him? It’s not clear in the 3rd sketch, but the characters were lit from the left, and the shadowed part of their faces were to look like skulls. Moot point since we didn’t use it!
I take the 4th sketch, which is literally about 2-3 inches high, and I blow it up in my Artograph (table-top projector that faces down onto the paper). Then I tighten it up, and make some adjustments. One adjustment was the characters on the right of the cover. The man holding the gun was too short, and I had all the women pushed to the back. I needed to change that up. I also didn’t like the angel pose. He was too far away, and his body was too symmetrical. What’s called “twinning”. In other words, it was boring!
Another trick I do while tightening up a drawing is to flip it over on a lightbox and fix the drawings on the back. It’s an invaluable trick. You’d be surprised how much a drawing can look weird when you flip it. That’s when you know it’s time to fix it!
Now that I’ve scanned in the art, I lay out the black placement due to light sources in the art on my Cintiq tablet (a digital drawing pad I can draw directly on). I also quickly throw in where the title will be to make sure everything is working and not getting covered up.
Now knowing where to place all the shadows, I finish penciling the piece. I also now add the ghost on a layer (on the right) as separate art to see placement. I’m going to make it transparent later, so why make myself crazy trying to color it like it’s transparent, when it could just actually be?
The fire creature (Vlam), and the fire girl behind the werewolf, both require a 9B pencil to get the charcoal feel I’m looking for. But I do that on a separate sheet of rough paper, and I put that on a layer as well. You can get different coloring effects depending on what layer effect you choose. For Vlam, I used “linear burn”. Try it out with an overlay over something with more than one color! I should be clear though. Find a process that works for you where your line art, charcoal art, etc can be separated from the white background. Doing that allows you to color the actual line work if you so choose.
For the first time on anything AoD, I’ve inked the cover traditionally. I don’t usually ink anymore and wanted to stretch out those muscles again. This is all brush and microns. Usually on the pgs and the covers so far, it’s been all pencil and digital inks, where I’ll go in and clean up and darken the pencil lines to make them look like they’ve actually been inked. I do a lot of digital inking on the werewolf every issue to integrate his fur with the black I’ve spotted for him. I gotta say though, inking him traditionally is much more enjoyable.
The cover is finally inked. I’m not worried about the 2 characters above not separating so much, because I know that Vlam is going to have that charcoal effect on him, and that’ll help to separate them some more. I also have the benefit of knowing how I plan on coloring the two of them.
Before I do any picky lighting or special fx, I do the flat colors first. That way, you can see how everything sits together in the same space, and you can plan ahead for any problems that might pop-up. Sometimes color values can be too similar, and then something that needs to pop, won’t pop. A good way to find out if your color values are too similar is to take a screen shot of what you’re working on, and convert it to grayscale. If figures/ important details look lost in the shuffle, the values are too close together for anything to have any individuality. Meaning, lights against darks!
I dropped the ghost in at 80% on a separate layer, set to “normal”.
 The cover is now finished! I probably spent way too much time on this cover, but I had so much fun it was worth every minute. Once the piece was finished, the color scale was too warm and literal for me. So (an idea I got from what colorists Ivan Nunes and Rael Sidharta do on the book) was to add a little light blue from the bottom. In horror films, they always seem to use a blue or green filter to creep out the scenes more. I didn’t want to go too crazy though, so I did a gradient of light blue to clear (a gradient function) halfway from the bottom, dropped the layer to 50%, and set the layer to “color”. It helped to desaturate some of the color in a nice way.
One of the other effects I did was on Vlam’s flame. I selected the area I colored for his flame, then on a separate layer, set to “color”, I selected the blue from his horns, and washed it over the flames with the pen tool set to about an 8% flow.
Another quick, easy effect to do is to select all the black, and move the selected pixels, NOT the actual art, and then on a new layer, wash over the selected area with a lighter color, like I did with the Rainbow Serpent’s scales. There’s some trial and error involved, but you’ll understand when you try!
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