It’s Not Like I Want to Spend So Much Time Away
So…yeah, it’s been a good long time since I posted anything here. I’m not really sure what to say about that except…damn. In the plus column, if you could call it that, while I’ve been away from posting here, I’ve filled something like four small sketchbooks and two or three larger ones with drawings. In short, I have plenty of material to talk about.
In scanning through my drawings I found several that were running on a bit of a theme. A while back a friend of mine started publishing her…very adult stories about a woman and her special friend who is a…yeti. Okay, look, it’s erotic fiction featuring a woman and a yeti. She has always enjoyed my drawings, and I offered to try my hand at drawing a book cover for her. Then a lot of stuff happened. A lot of it bad. Most of it I’m still dealing with, and I didn’t finish the book cover.
Fast forward a year or two and my friend has to go into the hospital to address some health issues. As a way to cheer her up during her recovery I picked up her characters again, and started researching cover art for romance novels. The idea being to take existing romance novel cover art, and insert her characters into the scene.
Now, I had always been kind of dismissive of romance novels. They seem like the perfect thing to pick up at an airport bookstore. Cheap, disposable, short on substance, and a guilty pleasure, even for those who follow a favorite author. The covers were the best/worst part. Cheesy images of muscular men looming over busty women who seem to be having a kind of wardrobe malfunction nightmare scenario.
I was wrong. The authors who are responsible for these are serious writers. There are awards for romance novels and novelists, and it is a genuine literary category. I was also wrong about the cover art. There are some great covers by very skilled artists, and there is a distinct style to the cover illustrations. I found this as I did essentially master studies of their work.
The funny thing? Doing studies of the work of the artists who illustrated novels for romance covers helped boost my own artistic abilities to a new level.
As I was going through and scanning some of my recent drawings I found that I had enough for a bit of a themed post, so here they are.
To get the style, I started out looking for photo reference of romance novel covers. My search history, recommendations on Amazon, Instagram ads, and Pinterest notifications got…real interesting around this time.
To continue learning the style, and to figure out what I wanted the final piece to look like, I tried studies of a few different covers from different artists. Here is another one. The cartoonist (or smart ass, I never can tell) in me couldn’t resist adding some word balloons here.
It’s around this time I was starting to recognize that the artwork adorning these covers was no joke, and the illustrators were legit artists. Once I started to appreciate the style, and I’ve even come to enjoy it a bit, things started to click. Here’s another sketch from around that time.
About this time I had what I needed in terms of an understanding of the style, composition, and tone. It was time to start trying to tackle the characters. Here’s one of the first concepts I did including my friends original characters.
I still like the one above, but ultimately I wanted the interaction between the characters to be more personal and intimate. I wanted them facing each other. So here is a sketch where I’ve gone through and started inking.
And here is the final, which was NOT done in my sketchbook. I used Strathmore marker paper and copic markers. I’m not usually a huge stickler for the kind of paper I’m working with. Different papers have different qualities. In this case, I wanted to use marker paper because I would be working in grays, and I didn’t want the already muted tones to become muddied because they’re bleeding into the paper.
Overall, while there are things I would change, I’m happy with the result, and my friend was over the moon when I handed it to her, which is what really matters.