Horror book cover: illustration case study

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Wayne Hopkins contacted me to create a custom illustration for another book cover: At the Dead of Night, a psychological horror novel.

Some design and illustration process insight ahead:

Lettering

I started with lettering decisions. Among the inspiration sources there were: slasher horrors from 70-90' and their posters in particular - utilizing mostly bold, heavy sans serif display fonts, often hand-drawn or decorated. Consequently, as a direct reference for this title I opted for Lugosi, modified in height and spacing - paired with a more structured form of EB Garamond with adjusted kerning, as I needed something legible in smaller formats and this font was already utilized in this author's publications. Eventually typography was to be inked by hand.

Lettering got packed into a concise square shape, utilizing negative space and an addition of an embellishment - in a form of a piece of a barbed wire, which later became a reoccurring theme in this print edition.

Contents

The author wanted me to include the following elements:

- some sort of a fence

- a meadow with a bonfire

- a treeline in the background

- a starry sky

- a face with green eyes floating in the sky

The last mentioned part (floating face/eyes) caused the most trouble as I wanted to avoid B-rated movie tackiness - even if it's present in the reference materials from the slasher era, I wanted the illustration to have much more modern and mature aesthetic.

Thumbnail sketches

To make sure everything is set in the right spot I inked the piece in a thumbnail size first, so we could decide on further direction and changes. Shortly after - as the project's scope included a flat-color version aside from the inked illustration - I prepared the first preview for a color palette as well.

Full scale inking

Upon acceptance, I started working on the illustration in a full scale:

Short inking footage can be seen here.

Colorization

After scanning the piece I colored it digitally with custom-made brushes sampled from my own traditional inks for more visual consistency. The addition of a green hue on the eyes at the time, however, seemed a bit unjustified among other colors in the chosen palette - so in order to make the choice feel more deliberate I added some moss to the fence post as well. Later on the illustration got separated into color layers and vectorized for the future.

Extras

Additionally, the project got accompanied with endpapers consisting of a seamless pattern derived from the wire on the cover, a title page, chapter headers and embellishments for the books' body.

Print preparation

And finally: the book cover got stitched together with a spine and back cover, including blurb (stylized after Rosemary's Baby from 1967) and ISBN box. The whole project is printed in the perfect bound technology, so the spine width was calculated for the exact page count and the paper type used. Crucial elements got located within safe zones and the bleed was set accordingly.

Since this edition was paperback rather than hardcover - the endpapers got located on the inner side of the cover via duplex printing. Color management has been done in Scribus.