Author and artist J.C. Stevens has published two of her three "Dragon Lad" books for young readers. I have provided her with related web work, cover designs, and animation. 

For the first book I developed the cover design, in conjunction with the author, as well as the cover illustrations.

I next created a 20 second animated sequence, based on that first book cover art, for use in a short promotional video produced by the author.

For the second book cover, Stevens had already created a well-developed illustration, but wanted me to make some alterations and enhance the drama within the illustration. I also designed and rendered a ring that is a pivotal plot device within the story.

Above is the cover of Book I, as delivered to the author. The author later made minor changes prior to publishing the book. Those changes, executed by the author, affected text formatting and some graphic elements, but did not fundamentally change the look.

I created this silent animation sequence, based on the first book cover from a storyboard provided by the author. A higher resolution video file, and the editable Premier file were delivered so she could embed the clip, add music, and sound effects in a short promotional video that she produced.

On the left is the original cover illustration as provided to me by the author. For me, trying to match the anime-inspired style and intentional flatness of the illustration were a challenge.

My version shown in the center was based on input from the author. Changes included the dragon, the character's face and hands, shadows and atmosphere, and moving "the talisman" into the foreground - based on its prominent role in the series, to add visual depth and drama to the image, and because the talisman summons the appearance of the dragon vision.

The author preferred the right-hand illustration, which more closely matched the flatter look of her own illustrations within the book - which are in turn, stylistically based on old woodcut prints.

This was the final illustration as delivered. After providing a series of hand drawn sketches to the author, I developed her choice as a flat profile in Photoshop. This provided a rectangular dragon tail pattern which I could then apply to a 3D model I created in SketchUp. After skinning the 3D model and positioning it, I exported a 2D image back to Photoshop for additional enhancements.

These images were captured from a 3D DAE output of my ring model from SketchUp. In the story, the way the ring is worn - tail up or down - is a key plot element. I provided this model to the author so she could easily use Preview to manipulate the 3D angle of the ring as a static graphic or create an animation clip that could be imported into Premier.