ROL: Nikki

Back to covers and slideshows. Next up…Ring of Lightning.

Painting with the computer is increasingly fun…provided you remember which layer you’re working on. Right now, I spend an inordinate amount of time poking and prodding through layers, trying to remember which are visible and which aren’t (so I can get back the “current” image), searching for the teeny weeny line that’s bugging me. What you see on the slide show are just the layers that add to the final result.

I am not what you would call methodical in my approach. I tend to attack one thing, then another, so my layers can end up…shall we say mixed. But the following will give you an idea of how the image developed.

I began with a sketch. I knew I wanted the three brothers on the cover surrounded by…a ring of lightning. So:

Nikki, as you may note, is the least realized. Nikki has always been hard for me to capture, because he’s so elusive. Of all the bros, he changes the most throughout the course of the book. He’s one of those adorably attractive individuals who has unconsciously learned to use his wide-eyed innocence to manipulate those around him. He doesn’t consciously desire that, but that’s how he’s learned to control his environment, which was chaotic to say the least.

Let’s be honest. In the beginning, Nikki is a spoiled brat. Sweet, but spoiled by two overly caring and indulgent older brothers. He’s been protected from most of Real Life. He likes books. And History. And Horses. He’s a Dreamer with a very large capital D. This is a tough combination to capture (at least for me) and it’s important to get him right.

Fortunately for this cover, AbbeyLynn gave me an answer way back when.  She gave me a Real World model when she  proclaimed William Katt from Pippin as the Perfect Nikki. I was familiar with WK from Greatest American Hero and other work, but I’d never seen Pippin. We rented it…and she was absolutely right. And I loved the play. I had to get the DVD.

So…when the time came for this, I pulled out my DVD and took stills to get a reference, and I was off to the races.

First, a more realized sketch:

These sketches, BTW were all done on my computer! Yay, me! And Yay Wacom board! And Yay Autodesk Sketchbook express. That is one nice little drawing program. It’ll do more, but all I need it for right now at least is sketching, and it does that really well. Compact and quick to load, you can start it when you’re in the mood, choose your pencil (or pen) and charge ahead.

Then, it was take the sketch into PSP and begin to play:

All images are copyright © 2009 Jane S. Fancher. Thank you for respecting that copyright.

A lot of the final changes were in response to the  reduced size of the final image. He became all chin on the small image until I squidged it in with the warp brush. One of the problems with working larger than the final image is what happens in the reduction algorithm. A line that’s just a few pixels wide can go a lot of different directions when you reduce by 75% or more. It’s an interesting problem when I want to end up with something we can also print out for framing.

Anyway…tomorrow…big bro, Deymio!

Ja ne!