Paint dynamic cover art

Jon Foster runs through his approach for developing a commissioned piece, tackling initial ideation, greyscale development and colour choices

Jon Foster develops a commissioned piece, tackling initial ideation, greyscale development and colour ideas.

It’s always a thrill to get a job from ImagineFX! In this case I was asked to create the cover art, and document my creative process.

However, I’ve chosen to go more into what I consider the foundations of developing an image: how to come up with good ideas and compositions rather than, say, what brushes I use. Indeed, I don’t use any exotic brushes in Photoshop or Painter. It’s more important to know how to use those brushes, and the creative decisions you make with them.

With that said, I’ll cover the initial reading of the script or synopsis as supplied by the ImagineFX team, how I try to gather what’s important from the story and then the process of distilling that information into an image. Then we move on to working out your ideas in thumbnail and sketch form for the team to review. In this case there wasn’t a lot of reading to do and the job brief was very specific. This meant that ImagineFX had a clear vision of what it wanted, so the initial steps were truncated into producing rough comps for approval, but just for clarity I’ve included the process that’s more common when making book covers.

Next, I discuss how important working on your composition in greyscale is, to make sure your selected idea is conveyed accurately. For me, colour is a confusing element if it’s applied too soon, so I leave it for the second half of the process.

I hope you get something from this article that’s of help to you, or that it reaffirms what you already know!