Smolder Scrolls: Potion Love COVER PROCESS YEAH!

Gosh, how the heck do you even do a heckin' cover illustration goshgoshgosh. Well first you gotta do doodles!

(okay the last one there came later on but anyways!) Doodlin' out some ideas with the intent of ideas like "CUTE" and "COUPLE?!" with an emphasis on "they gonna bang"? Some ideas I suppose, but some of my local friends insist I could do better than "two buds hang out"

Okay. More doodlin' then.

I can not confirm that I did a few doodles at work during a break! Really rough doodles, but you can see my (very vague) inclusion of foliage startin' again. I'm a sucker for art nouveau and needless foliage details so okay I went with it, but these sketches were too La Pieta for my tastes.

SO MORE SKETCH? YES.

(To be fair, please revisit the final doodle in the first picture, which was then kinda revised into this)

A heavily art nouveau inspired, open air, heavy foliage, dark background, with a bit of desk to add depth to the composition? YEAH OKAY!

So now we get to THE PENCIL SKETCH 

FIRST! Major composition details right? Gotta get the characters in a good spot, which took a little doing to get right. You might be able to see I shifted my pencil boundaries a quarter inch in this one, which was easier to adjust that starting over to move them slightly (haha!).

Also pic because that good butt was about to get some pants on it (such a shame)...

(the good butt livessss!)

I played with the idea of putting more on the desk surface, but cut it later to not over-complicate the image space. The foliage was gonna do enough in that space, but I just pencilled a place to put them for this part, to save on time. I kinda of fudged a few art nouveau themed fonts together to make the "Potion Love" title. (side note: Tainted Love kept popping into my head while I worked on this cover, haha!)

Also, embellishments! Embellishments for EVERYONE! Cause they look nice okay?

The inks stage took a while, mostly due to the foliage! I had a whole bunch of editing with J'drassa's eyes because I drew them a little too "uncomfortable" when I originally intended to just "surprised!"
Also had to move some of the text around a little bit just to look a little better...
Oh well. Fixed now!

ALWAYS DO THE BACKGROUND FIRST WHEN COLORING OOF
Started with a flat color, and with photoshop's color dynamics- painted in the colors for the flowers, foliage, and a few background elements. 

Mostly sourced the character colors straight from the comic for flats, but changed the potion bottle in J'drassa's hands for clarity here, and bumped up Dar'Miran's orange-ness.

ALL THAT REMAINS? Shading, highlights and such!

Ahh, the good Khajiit boyfriends. Added another gradient shadow over the foliage, because they needed to move back a little more for the composition.

But gosh, I'm so glad it's made. Hope you enjoyed this look into my process folks! Have a good weekend!