Crimson Spiders Cover Art
This is my second of two book covers that I designed for a friend's e-books. The concept of the cover was surprisingly easy for me to visualize as I read the short story, but it took me a while to put it to paper. Oddly enough, my vision for the cover art was in line with the author's vision without consulting him before I started brainstorming.
Day 1: The start of the digital art process...this is a few hours into the piece. I used paths to draw the shapes over my sketch, embossed it, and the burn and dodge tool to add the shading and highlights. The spider is an original icon created using a spider image for reference.
Day 2: About three more hours work. More textures added to give a worn effect. The first layer of metallic texture was created using a new layer of black with the noise, motion blur, and ocean ripple filters applied. The second layer of the more weathered metal is an overlay of various stock photos.
Tack on a few more hours and I'm almost there! Still working on the shoulder area and the torso...the textures and the shading of the under armor are still not to my liking, so I plan to redo it. The dried blood splatter is a brush from www.photoshoptutorials.ws
Nearing completion...just a few minor adjustments here and there before I add the text to the cover.
DONE! And leaving the text layout preference to the author to decide (he chose the second version). Not bad for approximately 14 hours of work. :) Thanks for viewing!
You can find Christian Freed's e-books on both Amazon Kindle and the Nook by Barnes & Noble.
