The Retribution of A Cursed Swordsman Webnovel Cover

This is the cover that started it all. I was approached by my friend at the time who asked me if I could color a drawing he made so he could use it for his webnovel. It happened so that at that time I had a project to create a book cover, flaps and all, and even the formatting and typography inside of it, so I happily took the task.

I finished the coloring, but I wanted to see if I could improve it in any way. Since I wasn't drawing the illustration he sent me from scratch, I couldn't tell where to place certain shadows or colors and had difficulty adding in the typography - though, to be fair, that's just me in general, since my typography skills are a bit lackluster.

Starting from the top, I sketched out thumbnails trying to recreate the concept that was given to me. I inquired about many things regarding the scene, from the emotion, to the outfit, to the posing before making the final sketch. This seemed like the first time I seriously worked on creating an environment to make the illustration complete. Usually it would just be some blotches of color or some incredibly simple or blurred stuff to just have something there, and at the time, this felt pretty big to me.

After agreeing on the sketch that he saw, I proceeded to color everything in a simple manner. I already had my colors down, so I just needed to tweak my values, so for the majority, I was color picking from the sketch when I happened to be unsure of what color would suit. This might be because, when making the sketch, I used watercolor or airbrushes which mixed well with each other so that environment color slowly bled through onto the outfit and the character and made everything seem more put together, and because choosing the colors was quite fun.

When the illustration reached its final form, came typography to hit me like a truck. I tried quite a few fonts but I had no idea how to blend it into the illustration itself. The author found a typeface that he liked, and so the 'Swordsman' came to look like that after I added some tweaks and added some of my own touches to the font, partially to make it fit the cover, partially because it was a no-commercial-use type of font. It was either tweaks or a possible court case for him and I feel like the changes made were big enough that you can't even recognise it anymore. From the thickness of some edges, to the size, to the distance between the fonts, serifs, etc.

In conclusion, the cover did pretty well, it looked nice on a small scale, since the colors only really differed between the character and the background, making him stand out and help lead the eyes from his face to the name of the novel.