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.

I know that a lot of fantasy fonts are usually cursive-serif-ish, but I don't really like just typing up words and changing the fonts. I like to make them unique so they feel tailor-made to the client's book. So I'll show you step-by-step how I made the title and hopefully that'll give you some insight as to how I try to make custom titles.

I started with this giant C.

I really loved how sharp the upper half is as it reminds me of fangs and kinda relates to the danger in the forest.

So chopped it in half and mirrored the upper portion to fill the bottom I cut out. With two fang-like serifs on the C, it feels a bit more dangerous now.

Next, I added the rest of the text. There's actually three different types of fonts here.

Then, I made the giant C skinnier and taller because I sorta wanted it to match the giant T at the end. Also because the wider C stood out too much.

After finding a size I felt happier with, I beveled/embossed it.

Next, I painted bits of white (via color dodge layer) to make the metal effect shinier.

I really wanted to tie the title in with the cover picture so that it doesn't seem like a separate entity. So, I added a glowing light glare thingy. I also shaded the C and O with green (via a color dodge brush) to really make that light believable.

The final step for this title would be to take some vine pngs, bevel/emboss them, and wrap them around the title.

It's not a Repulsify cover unless something's been painted. For those of you who follow my tutorials, you should know that there is always some element in my designs that's been manually painted. I love adding painted elements as it allows me to further customize a design and also because I like painting in general.

For this cover, I painted some glowing leaves. I would show the tutorial for that, but Wattpad says I'm not allowed to add any more pictures to this tutorial. If you guys want the tutorial for how I paint magical glowing things, just let me know!

Back to the design! I ended up circling the leaf storm sort of around his legs. For the finishing touches, I added his name and also these low opacity green orbs (bokeh effect) around the bottom portion of the forest.

And voila! All done!

*Thank you for following this tutorial and thank you Nlght_lock for letting me design your cover! If you guys like fantasy-adventure stories with a coming-of-age theme, go and give Conquest a read. Have a beautiful rest of your day!*