Comic Brief: Illustrative Development

As a different route I wanted to work with just the face of the main character. I found this picture to work from, but only wanted to use it as reference because I want all the material to be my own work.

I took the basic kind of facial structure in the image and drew it out in the form of a template that I could use to work from with a few different styles if necessary. In the bottom corner you can see a few quick layout designs that I came up with for an initial cover idea to work with and develop.

I used this template to create a really sketchy full drawing of the head of the main character. I chose this style to represent the dark elements of the story and give it a kind of demonic look. 

After this I put it into illustrator and played with the live trace settings until I thought it worked well and then started trying to work with the type and image together to make a preliminary cover. 

I wanted to give the type the same kind of texture as the livetraced illustration so that they fitted better together so I tried a few different things to get the right look. 

After working with this, I thought the type might be a bit too bold so I worked to try and reduce the thickness and see if it was more appropriate and then added it together with the image to start making up a preliminary cover to work with. 

I like this idea as a first kind of prototype cover design and I will try to make more that are relevant to the story. Potentially I could make one for each of the 7 main characters of the stories and release the series as 7 books rather than 5, which would be more relevant to the Sandman universe anyway.

Other stuff can easily be added to this design to give it the full cover look, like author or illustrator or publisher, eg.