I’m nearing in on the end of Fair Upon the Tor, which means I’m working on cover art for the final ebook. I was never (at all) happy with the art I did for The House of Snow & Apples, so I’ve gone back and done my best to produce one of the werewolves in the book. I’m not terribly happy with this either, but it is workable at least. My plan, originally, had been that all the covers would have animals or creatures on them, so it’s nice to come back to this theme.
The original pencil sketch is above and the final piece of work produced using photoshop brushes is below. Fur is really annoying. Much more annoying to draw in photoshop that feathers, scales or skin. I might end up creating a tutorial just to remind myself how I did this, because, really, really, I do not want to try and figure it out again.
After changing the colour of the sketch to something more blue-grey, I used Grut’s Cherry-Pectin brush to fill in a lot of detail. This brush produces a nice watercolour feel and lets you move the ‘paint’ around and smudge things up nicely. I then used Fur#1 from… actually I have no idea. It’s a ChracterBrushes.abr in my ‘free to use’ file. Normally I keep track of where brushes come from. There’s no info associated with this package though. I’ll hunt around and see if I can work out who the author is. Anyway, the fur brush worked okay, but I then needed to use a smudge tool, motion blur and soft paintbrush strokes as per this tutorial here. The final result is still a bit amateur, and I’ve lost some of the detail in the sketch that I liked (honestly, the sketch is probably better than the final painting piece, overall), but, it’s good enough for now.
Edit: I forgot to add, the fog is from an Obsidian Dawn mist and fog paintbrush set. All of the Obsidian Dawn brushes are amazing.