Woo, the Special Edition label! Been so long since we did this that I was in the middle of setting this one up before I remembered that I wanted to do it and had to redo a chunk of the cover to move the logo to fit it in!
There isn't really an average number of layers it takes for us to do a given page, but just for a bit of a point of reference here - the last Blues page had 15 layers, the last Blues cover had 17. This one had 37. Loooot of time and effort went into really trying to make this one pop.
It's sort of funny, we didn't really intend on paper to give as clear of a view of this person as we do here, was supposed to be much more framed in shadow than she wound up being. Guess it works just as well though since it's a design we wound up very happy with; she went through a few revisions before we really settled on a look we were sold on and very happy with that, though we'll probably need to wait to talk about this character some more once we actually meet her.
It's sort of a difficult cover to comment on admittedly since there is a lot going on with it and there are of course deeper meanings here that'll kind of become clear as the chapter goes along. Really wanted it to be impactful and to give a lot of room to speculate about it. We get quite a bit of that on our Discord, so why not think about joining in on the conversation? We always love to hear from people on there.
... It's actually sort of funny how often we seem to come back to puppet imagery, given both the tenth anniversary picture and the chapter 1 cover also do something like this (granted the anniversary picture was kind of directly setting this up and all). Weird how that works out. At least Sarabeth is one of the puppets instead of the puppeteer this time?
Heh. Funny, I was looking forward to seeing this cover posted just because of how badass it is, and having to scroll past it to comment meant getting a long look at the dangling puppet strings and.... Heh. Yeah, nice. Very creepy. ^^ So many great little touches to add onto how uncanny this image is.
This pretty little clown was the shadowy figure in the last page of the last chapter, and her design went through quite a bit of back-and-forth to get looking just right. The funny thing is that without really meaning to we wound up going eviler and eviler and eviler with her, until she just looked like something that would stalk you in a horror game. The hair in particular was a bit of an experiment to make sure it looked creepy and disheveled enough, but had a great final product.
Love the logos we're doing for the chapters now too; this one was my idea, with the sword-in-the-stone motif to the words. The window was all Martin too, and it left a great impact on the rest of the image.
I had actually forgotten about the Special Edition bits, but glad that Martin brought that back up here. Especially since the next Blues chapter definitely calls for it...
Funny, all those characters as puppets meant that it was hard to come up with a character for the little box in the upper left, and that wound up being a pretty late addition to the page.
Really hard to discuss covers without going into what the chapter'll be about, but really hope folks'll enjoy this one. Has a LOT of moments we've wanted to do for forever.
.... Heh. Funny, just realized that the next cover of both comics won't have that "can't say what THIS is about" issue.
There isn't really an average number of layers it takes for us to do a given page, but just for a bit of a point of reference here - the last Blues page had 15 layers, the last Blues cover had 17. This one had 37. Loooot of time and effort went into really trying to make this one pop.
It's sort of funny, we didn't really intend on paper to give as clear of a view of this person as we do here, was supposed to be much more framed in shadow than she wound up being. Guess it works just as well though since it's a design we wound up very happy with; she went through a few revisions before we really settled on a look we were sold on and very happy with that, though we'll probably need to wait to talk about this character some more once we actually meet her.
It's sort of a difficult cover to comment on admittedly since there is a lot going on with it and there are of course deeper meanings here that'll kind of become clear as the chapter goes along. Really wanted it to be impactful and to give a lot of room to speculate about it. We get quite a bit of that on our Discord, so why not think about joining in on the conversation? We always love to hear from people on there.
... It's actually sort of funny how often we seem to come back to puppet imagery, given both the tenth anniversary picture and the chapter 1 cover also do something like this (granted the anniversary picture was kind of directly setting this up and all). Weird how that works out. At least Sarabeth is one of the puppets instead of the puppeteer this time?