Issue 09 Cover Reveal and Process!

Art Director Riley reporting in for Wizards in Space! I'm thrilled to reveal the book cover art for our final issue and talk about the art process for a bit if thats all cool with you.

Alt text: An illustration featuring flowing clouds with a group of etheral owls flying by. In the clouds are flowing lines of colors in the rainbow. From the pockets of exposed sky is falling stars.

For this issue, we wanted to focus on the theme of chapters. How they start, how they end, and everything in between. As an artist, it’s a little intimidating to create an image with such a open ended theme. This cover has changed the most throughout the designing process than any other cover before it.

Stage One: Inspiration and Sketches

My first direction was researching in astronomy what encapsulated the theme chapters to me. So I was reading about black holes, supernovas, and most importantly nebulas. I was really interested in how dramatic beginnings and endings are in space. As you can tell by that idea in the lower half of the image, I had considered drawing a supernova. I just couldn’t figure out how I would render it in the style of WiS. It was also maybe just a tad too on the nose and dramatic for me in the end.

I pivoted to how the clouds of gases I was looking at in my research was just too beautiful in their own right. How they both looked flowy and yet still at the same time. Olivia and I had discussed before how for the final issue, it would be important to incorporate all the colors of the rainbow. Nebulas could easily fulfill that goal. I drew the top two concepts after my research. Struggling now on the composition of said clouds. I could either use them as guides for the eye to travel along the cover, reading the title in a slanted stack. Or I could make the clouds more cohesive and the title centered, creating a visual feeling of more stability.

I am sharing my progress to my trusted friends to hear their opinions. It seemed like once people got the context that this was the final issue, they leaned more to the stable centered composition. But because it was almost split down the middle, that tells me there is more work to be done to see what works for both of these ideas and how I can incorporate that. I cut up a version that kept the top clouds from the slanted composition and the bottom clouds of the stable composition. To me it was these clouds that look best and provide the most movement, they just needed to combined.

Stage Two: Experimenting and Pushing Through the Ugly Stage

Usually I would have an approved composition and go straight to final render (thanks to Olivia for trusting me that much). Yet I still had questions for this cover! It’s time to experiment with the render and see what I would find at the end. This of course takes more work and valuable time, but when you feel a disconnect from your head and your hands, you must push through the Ugly Stage in order to figure out what you want. The Ugly Stage is simply the foundational (and bulk) part of art creation that often looks nothing like what what you want. This stage is the hardest for every artist and can make your confidence wane by the minute.

In the image above, you can see a view of the process during this stage. The first cover in the line up is the original Ugly Stage render. Its messy, the textures are too much, and the lighting is not balanced. These mistakes are so crucial for me, because I often have to see what doesn’t work to find out what will. That’s the beauty of allowing yourself to experiment during the Ugly Stage, even if its not as streamlined as doing studies before going to the final render.

In the second version, I redrew the clouds entirely, making them more flat so it fit the style of the past issues. I start to draw the color wavelengths with a pencil brush so I could control how they’d look. Adding shooting stars in between the clouds to provide more visual interest and to lessen the harshness of the negative space.

In the third and fourth versions, I explore more with adding visual interest. Originally I thought the clouds would be too busy to incorporate other elements. Now I can see I needed something more. Trying first a moon (a tried and true method of issues past) but it felt too heavy on the page. I remembered the owl in Issue 02, and knew it was meant to be. As my nebula looks similar to the clouds we see at night, they fit perfectly.

Stage Three: Refining and Final Work

There is yet still some more things to correct as we get closer to the finish line. During the refining stage I was dealing with a family emergency, so I took to refining the color wavelengths and owls despite knowing there was something wrong with the composition itself. It was the easier fix to worry about while I can leave myself mental bandwidth for my family. Giving myself those days to just worry about drawing a bunch of lines over and over let me consider adding more owls to guide the eye through the image, and my biggest fix: changing the direction of the bottom clouds.

Simply flipping the bottom clouds had changed the entire image. I realized I was relying too much on the clouds as a guide for the eyes to follow through the image, when really the owls were doing a fine job of that. By making the clouds flow in the same direction instead of the zig-zag, they look way more cohesive.
All there was left to do was adding some darker colors behind any owls that overlapped the clouds (so they would pop), and format the title. The cover was done.

I learned so much through this cover, more than any of the past covers. I broke some rules, and it lead to great discoveries. Even if the cover may seem different from the earliest of issues, it truly is a testament of time. Those first couple of issues I was still in high school learning how to draw. And now I’ve graduated art school and still learning how to draw. I will miss the yearly ritual of trying to visual what world that has space wizards look like. Thanks for coming along the journey with me.

- Riley, Art Director