This cover was for a returning customer of mine. I made the logo for WyPark02's series a while back and this time I wanted to make him a whole cover even though he only asked me to make him some font.

Moral of the story: I'm extra. Especially if you're a returning customer.

I have NEVER done something like this and I've always wanted to add a mechanized eyeball to my portfolio. I'm not joking. 20+ years of video games taught me that mechanized eyeballs are the shit. If you like mechanized eyeballs too, give the "Deus Ex" game series a look. Human and cyborg augments galore!

Anyways, let me get to the tutorial instead of rambling about video games.

The Request

-Colors are black, white, gray, blue, and red

-Scifi/futuristic/mechanical/robotic

-symbolize some sort of AI

--Challenge Accepted!--

Design Process:
4 hours? [I was playing Overwatch in between so I lost count]

Let's start with a background! I decided to pick the first geometric/futuristic background I saw that had shades of gray or blue.

Next I chose this random eyeball I found on Pexels as the base of the mechanized-AI eyeball. He asked to keep it in a black-to-blue color scheme so I selected the iris and add a filter mask>>HSV/HSL adjustment layer to it, changing the color from brown to blue.

To get rid of that glare, I just copied and pasted the other half of the iris and smoothed out the rough edges with a soft eraser. I also erased bits off the face with the soft eraser/airbrush eraser.

Next step was to black out the top of the cover. I just took my airbrush and sprayed some black. I figured that this would be where the title would go.

Alright, let's mechanize this f**ker! So, I got myself an uncolored, sci-fi turbine design. I sat it over the eye and made sure it followed the curves of the iris before erasing it to suit the exposed area of the eyeball.

Once I was sure I got the parts I wanted in there, I pillow embossed (chisel hard). This created shadows around the edges of the eye to make it look like it's sitting under the eyelids.

Next I took the center of the turbine design (the fan part) and separated it from the rest of the turbine design. I layered it over the iris and set the layer to hard light.

For those that are curious, I was inspired by Hal 9000 from Space Odyssey and a bit by Sasuke Uchiha's sharingan (#weebsout).

The font was relatively simple. Typed out the title, bevel/emboss, and then added a subtle glow to it just so it can kinda match the glowing iris.

Bonus: check out the five hundred layers I use. I'm extremely disorganized lol.

Now to un-humanize this eyeball all I did was use a filter mask>>HSV/HSL adjustment to make the skin match the gray-blue color of the rest of the cover.

For the finishing touches, I added his author name and his wonderful logo. I may be biased on that logo....

And voila!

*Thank you for checking out this tutorial! You can see the logo and the cover without my watermark banner over at WyPark02's page! Have a wonderful day!