Detour Cover – the Dark and the Light

I mentioned yesterday that I usually color my illustrations in Photoshop because it takes me a while to get a good color combination worked out. The final cover art of Detour is a good example of that. It took me forever to get a good balance. I’d originally started with red and blue as my primary pallet but the “zombies”, being pretty blue themselves, didn’t stand out as well against the other blues. Once I substituted green I got a better contrast.

And I still needed to make adjustments at the very end. The final art looked pretty good on my computer but I’ll learned from sad experience that a dark, brooding image on a monitor just looks dark in print. Sometimes that’s what a publisher wants but I felt like I’d be doing the folks at 3Hombres Games a disservice if I didn’t give them a choice to work with. The second version below has the contrasts adjusted so it’s lighter. I figured that version was more likely to stand out on a display rack. Feel free to check out their announcement to see which version they chose.

6 thoughts on “Detour Cover – the Dark and the Light

  1. I like the cover a lot. Especially the Bhuta doing the driving part of it. I presume you did the banner like work on the interior as well, looks similar to me. I am looking foward to more covers from you for RPG products.

  2. TKim –

    Thank you for stopping by! All the illustrations, including the banner, in Detour are mine. Over the next week I’ll be posting the original sketches I did for each illustration.

  3. That shouldn’t be hard. (Though there’s this comic that I’m supposed to be contributing to the book that I’m way behind on finishing.)

  4. Mike –

    Not so much. I’m interested in it but I’ve only got so much time available. Illustration is what I’m best at so I concentrate on that.

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