Virtual Dealer Cover Art Step by Step

Ok off politics and back to art for a little while. Your probably all glad to hear that :-) Watch out pretty soon Ill start doing Political art then were all in trouble LOL

Often members of the site express to me that they enjoy seeing the process by which i create a piece and the various preliminary works that are created in the process. I thought this months cover for the 2O2P Magazine would be a great one to breakdown for people and to share.

The first step is CodeMonkee discussed with me his desire to do an original piece for the cover that would have an UNO theme. We threw around some ideas and settled on an image of a sexy dealer tossing cards at the viewer while holding a fanned out bunch of cards. So the first thing was creating a bunch of quick sketches, 2 of which we settled on.





Then I got in touch with an online model that I have done work with before and asked her to take some shots in the concept poses for my reference. In exchange she gets a copy of the final work and all the exposure we can provide. So please go check out her site, she is very beautiful and very talented. Her name is Desiree and you can see more of her here. ( I tell ya this is a really rough job, but hey somebody has to do it :-) )





Based on the images I got back from Desiree, the following more finished sketch was made. Now before anyone, like you LBSUTKE :-) starts drooling and hooting and hollering, Desiree is a classy lady and she had on a very tasteful bikini for the picks, i just happen to be a dirty old man that drew her without that bit of apparel -LOL





From there an initial color study with an Idea on how the final color would be handled was generated. Notice at this stage the first take on the flying cards and the image has been flipped to better fit the cover and accommodate the copy that will go over it.





After reviewing the color study CodeMonkee and I began to think perhaps the "nude" image was not the most responsible presentation for the cover. We have allot of female members and readers and we didnt want to offend anyone. So we decided to put the Dealer in an outfit. The first effort at this new direction looked like the following:





The feeling was that this was a good idea but that the image was not very interesting. Upon reflection the concept of the UNO dealer being a 360 generated "Virtual" dealer lead to a more "SCI-FI" direction to the design of her outfit and to the flavor of the whole piece. The follow up color study looked like this :





Next the sketch of the 360 she sits on was brought t into Illustrator and illustrated.





Then the illustrated 360 was brought back into Photoshop and combined with the final pencil rendering of the new Hi Tech Virtual Dealer image. This version was then dropped into a mock up of a previous cover to make sure that the positioning would leave room for the logo and type.





Once CodeMonkee approved the final pencils and the positioning,a final solid black or inked version of the figure in Photoshop was made. This become the base that all the color is built on.





Here is the final color work without the type. By the way major league props to Lunatix!!!! For doing an exceptional job handling the placement of type over what ended up being a very busy and challenging cover image to work with in terms of type. He is a master!!!! Be sure to post up if you want me to post more process stuff like this in the future. Thanks to everyone that checks out and supports the magazine. If you havent seen this months yet you can still download a copy from the link at the front page of the site. Peace and see ya later when ill be getting back to my usual tyrannical political rants and raves at Bats Blog :-) Woot!