Ergoth book two a dragonlance cover

[dansadad]

http://216.71.84.80/devineillustration/ERGOTH.jpg

Hi gang!
here is the image from my last post, it's the cover to ERGOTH book two a Dragonlance book.
This was my third digital cover.
The pre-set type design was tricky to work around but the cover is a half wrap, where the art wraps around the back about half way.

I had alot or creative freedom on this series, so I picked different influences for each cover.
this one was influenced by Tibetin art .
the wizard in the piece had his left arm ripped off and he grafted another one on.
To show this I made the arms slightly different colours and made him almost cradle it behind his right arm, we do this when we have been hurt.
I do this now, I had rotor cuff surgery on my right arm (my art arm) and I still favor it trying to protect it from harm while its weak.

These are the things that you can add to your characters to bring a sense of humanity to them.
this was painted in painter 7 on a wacom 12x12 tablet.

Daniel

[Wacom Knight]

Dan, again beautiful work, I'm jealous (looks like you get all the good jobs), I do all my ink work in Painter 7, and do all my "oil" work in Painter 8. The pallete knives in 8 really rock, I'd be happy to send you a close up sometime of how you can get a very solid oil feel with the new ones.

Are you working 1 to 5 layers pretty much? Here is another great Painter 7 artist, he is russian and works for a big 3D company there, get a chance, check him out.

Anry (http://www.anry.ru/rus/gallery/gallery.htm)

V Shane

[bRyaN]

Beautiful..

I own that book (amongst 80 something Dragonlance books)....

This is a total shell shock to me....

How many layers is this particuler piece?

[dansadad]

I dont work in layers, I'm only a year into digital painting and still figuring out how to do different things.

It does take me forever to finish a painting so I guess I should work on my digital skills more.

[carlo]

Dan, dude. Keep painting the way you are, you dont need layers from the work that i've seen. Craig Mullins uses very few layers and does most of his painting on one. I work in movies and videogames and would like to try some romance novel work, how did you get into that?

Digital is definitely the way to go for me, i work so much faster. I can get a finished painting done in about 10 hours from sketch to final with the digital medium and this is including revisions.

-C

[wassermelone]

The funny thing is... people that jump straight into digital tend to use a lot of layers... And people who learned to physically paint first tend to use very few if any at all.

Excelent painting.

-toasty =)

[cucaracha]

It's kinda cool, but I have to say I don't really like the composition.
There are a lot of strong colors, the image doesn't look balanced.

I'm not good in coloring, but if I look at other great artist's images, I can see balanced, not fully saturated colors.

For example this blue and cyan on the wall is disturbing; those purple grooves also.

But that's just my humble opinion :)

cu

[carlo]

Perhaps I can take this one Dan...This is an illustration for a fantasy book cover, there are sound marketing as well as artistic reasons to do a saturated painting. Firstly, The saturation heightens the fantasy theme of the image and secondly the bright colors are more eye catching especially considerring the small size of the paperback. As for the comments about the image not being balanced, you have to take into account where the titles and lettering will be.

-C

*covers Dans ears* Dont listen to the bad man.

[Skank]

yup
like he said in his discription, it wraps around the back so he had to extend the left side more.

im very happy youve joined our forum dan, ive learned alot from you already! its great to hear how other artists think and how they work...and now i dont feel crazy for using one layer on my paintings!!
:D