"Two Generals" Cover Illustration Process

Last week I sent off the very first piece of finished art for Two Generals. It was, as is usually the case, the cover (publishers need cover art for catalogues and marketing and such well in advance of the delivery of the rest of the art). The cover design isn't finalized yet (though I can assure you the book is going to look incredible) but I'm putting the illustration portion up here, anyway, because I'm excited about it.

I haven't done any "process" posts for a while, so I'll walk you through the creation of the image, starting with the thumbnails sketch (as always, you can click these images for larger versions):

My editors liked this concept (we'd thrown away several others over the course of brainstorming a cover) but asked that I remove the cigarette from the hand of the figure on the left. Set in 1943-44, the story is chock full of smoking, but they felt that depicting it on the cover might be a bad idea given how big a market we're hoping schools and libraries will be. Fair enough.

On to finished pencils:

I was happy with this drawing, except for the fact that both men looked a bit pigeon-toed. A quick fix solved that problem:

There! Around this point the right hand of the man on the left started looking a little large to me, but I figured I'd take care of that in the inks:

And finally, a little bit of colour, in the same style in which I'm colouring the interior pages:

 

I fiddled around quite a bit with colour, and how dark the shading should be, but I won't bore you with all those steps. In the end, the colouring process for this book is pretty simple (unlike Tower of Treasure, which was much more involved).

It's all starting to feel more real now. The book's listing is up at the McClelland & Stewart website (in Canada) and the Random House site (in the U.S.), and Amazon.com and Amazon.ca both have listings as well. So, if you're one of the people who aren't going to be able to wait for a copy, I suppose there's nothing stopping you from pre-ordering so that you get one as soon as it ships.

Now all I need is to get back to work and finish the rest of the book!

"The Sign of the Black Rock" Pencils

Speaking of The Sign of the Black Rock, pencils for the book are well underway. Here's a sneak peek at the first two pages, featuring a couple of the new characters from my last post.

"The Sign of the Black Rock" Character Designs

It definitely seems odd to be hyping new characters for the second Three Thieves book when the first book still doesn't hit store shelves for six months. Other than myself and a few "inside" folks at Kids Can Press, nobody even knows the old characters yet! But the new cast members are a lot of fun, and I enjoy these sketches of them, so here they are for the world to see.

Unfortunately, you'll have to wait until The Sign of the Black Rock is released in fall 2011 to learn more about this motley group and the hijinks they find themselves in (though I may be posting some pencilled pages soon, to give you some clues...so watch this space!)