Repulsive Graphics [CFCU]

13🔸Conquest + customizing titles

Fantasy covers. I'm no expert at them, but it feels like I slowly get better. I've been stalking a lot of people's cover shops lately (you know who you are XD) and I've learned a lot by just uncomfortably staring at 1 single cover of theirs from 10 minutes to a good hour.

The Request for Nlght_lock
-a boy doing a particular pose with a dagger
-fantasy adventure genre
-story takes place in a forest
-full creative freedom with font

--Challenge Accepted!--

Design Process: 8+ hours(?)

One of the reasons it took quite a bit of hours to do was because I was playing around with using a silhouette. I didn't really like the end result and ended up scraping it.

Anyways, I started out with a base picture. The summary states that the main character would be in a forest. The forest didn't sound all that friendly, so I took the most ominous forest I could find and set it as my background.

The first thing I did was to give it a bit of a blur to smooth out the grainy-ness of the pic. I cropped it to Wattpad cover size and made sort of a vignette around the edges by spraying some black around with an airbrushed. I also adjusted the colors (via colors adjust curves and HSL/HSV) to make the green stand out more.

The next step is to add our subject which is the young boy with a dagger. The author wanted this particular pose and I couldn't find any picture quite like it so I ended up using the reference picture he sent me.

Changing the shading on his body was relatively simple via the HSL/HSV or color curves tool. I had to add shadows and a green glow to the dagger so it would blend in seamlessly with the rest of the picture.