Creating a Cover

Nubia: Queen of the Amazons #1

Every wonder how we come up with this stuff? Here’s a lil sneak peak into the process of drawing a cover.

This is the initial idea I sent DC. I wanted to do a send-up of the famous Huey P. Newton picture where he has a rifle in one hand and a spear in another. They approved it, but instead of the generic Amazon warriors I had flanking Nubia, they suggested using Wonder Woman & Phillipus. Cool.

More refining and tightening. This step is a lot like sculpting — taking the very loose forms and slowly refining them until there is something that looks halfway decent. There is lots and lots of erasing and redrawing in this stage. This ain’t rocket science.

After some tightening up of “pencils” (quotations because this is 100% digital, for those of you wondering), I dive straight into the “inks.” Even though some details will be obscured in the final image, I draw each character fully and on a separate later, in case I need to move things around later.

More inking and refining. It was very important to me that each woman had a distinct face, stance, and posture. I hate cookie-cutter comics where everyone has the same face and no personality.

I put in place a background grid so that I can draw the throne and pedestal properly in perspective. Truthfully, this is ass-backward and I should have put this in first, but I’m a rebel.

The composition was feeling a little claustrophobic, so I shrunk everything down a bit so that the 3 characters could breathe and I could fit in more background amazons. As previously mentioned, since I fully drew out the 3 characters on separate layers, I was able to do this without having to redraw anything. I’ve been doing this long enough to know that things always change and you have to be able to adjust on the fly.

Finished line art! I added some special FX touches, like smoke and burning embers. Since this is a static image, I felt like I needed some motion, and the smoke and embers were a quick fix. After editorial approves the line art, it’s passed on to my buddy Emilio Lopez to add color and bring this thing to life!

Emilio generally starts an image by painting the background. This determines both the time of day and the general mood of the image. My suggestion was that this should feel like the tense period right before war starts, and this sky totally nails that.

I usually like to lay down grey tones as a way of creating clarity for the editors. Without it, all the various layers would be transparent (ie, Wonder Woman’s boots behind the shield). These tones double well as flats for Emilio. He can then use these to create easily selectable blocks of color to render in.

Emilio is a master of mood and emotion. Even at this early stage, he is able to convey a ton of feeling with very little rendering.

And Voila! Nubia: Queen of the Amazons #1, in stores in June.