Equestrian Landings by qwefg

The main reason for the delay was because I was been stuck in a funk for a while that really hampered my creativity in general, and I had to keep on going working on it, often without real passion on it, making me often go back to redo my work to try to fix every problems that I perceived in every detail. More and more I was obsessing on it that a certain point I was making more of a mess rather than fixing it. But, things started to get better for me I finally managed to overcome that hurdle and get into working on it with a real passion again to working on it at length.

Sense the story has a fairly strong MMORPG themed to it, along with being a HiE story, I decided to make this look like and action JRPG feel to it as with show character stats at the bottom of the six main protagonists of the story and adding a hexagon grid on the ground along with giving a character ID above the characters like in WOW. The grid was the part that I had the most trouble with because of way that I was making the grid; I had to make it very big to keep with the perspective look to it along with maintaining the green glow to it without taking too much ram space to the document. I had risking crashing Photoshop as several times. For the other stuff I just had to fiddle with the FX layer system, giving it a stroke around it and give it an outer green glow. For the composition, I was going more with the main character player group surrounded by other “payers” of all different races and classes that are poised to attack them at any moment. The center group where a joy to work with, in trying to convey the best way I could of each of their personality in their ready stance for battle.

Drawing the grenades in Stardust’s mouth, along with her rummaging through her saddlebags, was the first that I stated working on and was something that I already had planned from the start, and was something that I found funny  with her stance and “come and get it” gaze was a blast to do. Lockheart was a special challenge for me as it was the first real time that I really practiced drawing cloth folds of is red jacket along with trying to make it look like it is caught by the wind with the hood and the sleeves. I had to redo eyes because they just look weird. Maxwell was also fun to do with trying to show cowardice making him look at first that he is looking for ground cover and making him look terrified of the hopeless situation with they are all trapped in. But I did wanted him to still at least have his cutlass ready in his very prehensile tail that make him look like he is in a scorpion stance at a second viewing. Valkyrie was a little trouble to work with, not with the pose I had that pegged from the start, but it was more that I didn’t feel inspired to draw her with her armor which only cam later stages of the process. At least I felt that I did a good job then I finally finished her armor which came out rather well. Steel Halberd was fairly the same story, and seeing that he basically was supposed to look like your generic pegasus guard, it was just a question of getting into the mood of drawing him in an interesting defensive stance and signature weapon and his namesake, which first started out as an axe halberd rather than the spear one. Remedy Cross was actually fun to do, with being a medic guard duds in appearance, that is in juxtaposition with her vindictive demeanor in the story, was easy to imagine her to be at a ready battle stance with as horde of foes is not going to stop her from doing “preemptive triage” on her very soon to be “patients”.

A part that I had the most trouble, and delayed me the most, was to drawing all those different characters in the background, which sadly aren’t all shown in their entirety. I was trying to show some of the antagonists that are appear in the story, along with other more generic characters that have their own theme and back story that I was creating in my head. I didn’t want to waste too much time in drawing each of them with their own colors, so I went with gray scale instead. I had originally planned to make them all look like dark silhouettes but I go lost in drawing each of them with such detail that I couldn’t make them look as menacing and non-descript characters like I had originally planned, and just adding a layers of black didn’t cut it. So, I opted to as a sloppy red brush stocked layer of red set on Pin Light I think. I didn’t want it to be all a solid one color, so I left a few areas that did had read most noticeable the dragon. I think the red really helped making the crowd look more threatening and make it clear they aren’t there of tea and crumpets either.

You can find the different stages of the creation of the cover art in the link bellow.

sta.sh/02cilkqvuv8v