This cover marks the second time I've made a design for amyrobinnz's Grendilton series. To say I was a fan of this series would be the understatement of the century. I'm a fanatic. I've invented ships and theories in my head whilst reading. I might need an intervention due to my obsession with Macey and her savage clapbacks.

Anyways! I'm getting quite comfortable doing urban fantasy covers or fantasy covers in general. So let me show you the process!

The Request:
-a guy
-a sun scar
-a Raven tattoo
-black feathers
-black and yellow color scheme
-silver/metal text

--Challenge Accepted!--

Design Process: 6 hours over 2-3 days

So, I started with a base picture. I love using black and white pictures as it lets me fully customize skin color, hair color, and even background color.

Next, I started on the skin color. His skin color is actually a mix of reds, oranges, purples, and yellows on SVG and Color layers.

Now for hair color, all I did was use two layers. The first is an Overlay layer with white painted over the hair. The next layer is a Multiply layer with a light chestnut color. Multiply layers tend to make things darker, so it gave the lighter brown color the perfect amount of darkness to emulate the color you see below.

For the next part, I really wanted it to have a similar feel to the first Grendilton cover I did. Macey was surrounded by a red-to-black ombre of smokey shadows. So this time, I used a yellow-to-black ombre. Down below, you can see the paint brush I used along with the different shades.

Tattoos will forever be my favorite thing to do on skin. I took this raven tattoo and morphed it around his shoulder. If you want to see how I contort tattoos on a person's body, I suggest checking out Chapter 4 of this book, where I explain how I did Macey's tattoos.

His tattoo is a combination of two overlay layers with varying opacities.

The next part was the sun symbol. Like the first book, there's always a sun and moon symbolism. This time, I was supposed to make the sun seem like a scar. I had to look up pictures of scars and then some of my own to see how the shading works on skin.

I ended up taking a generic png of a sun and hand painting it on his skin. I used a combination of Overlay and SVG layers to paint the sun scar. As opposed to the tattoo, the scar has more of a fleshy color.

Next is the font! I used the same "Grendilton" from the first cover. The rest of the text was actually easy to make. I used the same technique of beveling/embossing the text to give it a metallic feel. For the "Solar" I painted it gold and added a shiny-glowy thingy.

The last step is to add the black feathers and the author name.

And voila! Another Grendilton cover completed! If you love the cover, go ahead and read amyrobinnz's series. It's snarky, magical, and so wonderfully written! (the cover are good, too! XD)