birth of a Cover

A cover is a rather long process before reaching the final stretch...here are the steps I took to arrive at the final version of the Heavy Metal cover.

The editor (Chris Thompson) proposed an idea that I found interesting and that immediately made me think of Salvador Dalí...It's about a woman who has to cross dimensional portals and in my head I didn't think of something science fiction but rather surrealist.

I didn't go looking for any particular references but rather I searched my memory for what made me think of surrealism... and some factors came to mind such as, for example, the colour orange (perhaps for some paintings by Dali but also by De Chirico).

I proposed five different sketches and he asked me to do a mix of these two.

So on one side a falling woman and on the other a Surrealist Box crossed by 4 portals...So I came up with this version ( this time I also inserted the spaces for the logo ):

But at this point, why not exploit all the portals?...here comes the foot and a new layout idea. I resumed the previous drawing (this time only in pencil) changing the composition

I confess I thought it would be nice to include some Escher references, so I thought about playing with the box art, creating inconsistent perspective effects. I thought it would be too much, so I limited the inconsistencies to a few small aspects, especially related to lighting... to convey a sense of disorientation.. So I made the pencil version... actually it's done in pencil with a light inking with the Frixion pen to highlight the parts that interested me:

At this point I moved on to the color phase, but decided to "play" with the light! In fact, in theory we should have four lights...with the same intensity, some stronger? Difficult to manage or imagine, so I tried to create a "surreal" effect by creating a shadow area at the bottom that, however, doesn't really correspond to the girl's shadow. At the same time, I also played with the lights on the girl herself...and had a lot of fun.

The color is a mix of chalk, watercolor and acrylic and compared to the pencil version I emphasized more on the movement of the hair and the shapes of the body.

In the final version I then added a purple color and some light effects on the portals in Photoshop. :)