Alamptria: Red Moon Rising novel cover

Here is a novel cover that I completed for Alamptria: Red Moon Rising, by Canadian fantasy writer Richard A. Valicek.

From the beginning the writer knew that he wanted to have one of the female main characters shown with a sexy and threatening gaze with the male character shrouded in shadowy surroundings, so most of my thumbnails were slight variations on that idea.

The challenge of this image for me was working with a large central figure whose expression tells more of the story than anything else. When working with large compositional elements like this the smallest adjustment in the expression can completely change the tone of the piece. So as you can imagine most if not all of the my sketches focused on the expression in the eyes.

The image was sketched in pencil then scanned and coloured in Photoshop.


Lamin


Sketch,