The Legendary F-Rank Webnovel Cover 2

The second in the trilogy, and my personal favorite. I had the most fun sketching and rendering this one out, though it feels like took the most effort as well, illustration wise. The concept was 'the MC walking out of a forest into a new city surrounded by a huge wall'.

A few questions popped into the mind while creating it: the composition, the color scheme, the architecture and then the character posing. The latter... Posed to be the most difficult. I already made multiple little thumbnails of the big picture, very simple, very easy to do. I wanted to include the character face, despite being told to do otherwise - it's the main character we're talking about after all. The color scheme left me scratching my head because there were so many colors that needed to be included, and you either do or you don't color harmony; I think I don't.

What sped up my progress was collage, mix and matching real people into the artwork until I found a pose that could potentially work. This only came to my mind after I'd made a few sketches and realized they took way too much time. Looking at how other artists do work definitely helps as well, I'd suggest it to anyone. I do quite like stealing bits and pieces of artist's techniques and incorporating them in my own work, such as coloring environments, or painting skies, adding textures, outlining, etc.

I knew I wanted to add in lots of textures, simply because they can help things feel more dynamic and alive and make the overall result more interesting to observe. At this point there are very few things that actually feel like they lack them, such as the hair, and walls in the buildings, because those wouldn't be visible from that far away anyway. There was also a little power up glow effect surrounding the character for a while, it definitely made him stand out from the background. However, it confused a few people, since they thought it was just the sunlight around him and it also hid most of the details in the background I put lots of work into.

The final composition choice turned out to be a little 'frame in frame' I tried to execute with the trees. Some people like it, some people don't, but I feel like the beauty of this is that you could quite easily crop into the illustration and you'd get rid of most of the tree and still have the space designated for text in the same aspect ratio required. And the finishing touches were just setting in the text from the first cover, recoloring it to match the composition, then placing it in the right place and size onto the illustration.