prince ewald . . . ( cover art/ process breakdown )

Hoo boy this one's a doozy! 

I've done a few commissions for Dylan of characters from his fantasy series and he was nice enough to think of me when it came time that he needed cover art for his newest book! 

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I had a bit of a challenging time working on this job, despite feeling really confident in the planning stages and feeling really excited to polish it up more into the final version; as you can see in that first progress breakdown, after the concept was approved I just... I was having so much trouble getting the energy I had imagined for the titular prince. As you can probably guess, the more I chair-legged the drawing, the more frazzled and frustrated I got that it wasn't just working. After some debate, I ended up redoing the sketch for the pose and was feeling a bit of that momentum again, only for the inks to come out suuuper different from the sketch (and that pass of the inks was with a fair amount of tweaking and resizing shit). I'd spent way longer on the job than I'd expected to and felt like I wasn't improving anything at that point, so I sent it to Dylan for approval and despite my dissatisfaction with the piece, he liked it.

So now it's like... what, a month, month and a half later, and I'm pulling up the files for this job. I still REALLY do not like where I ended up with it and it sucks because Dylan has been amazingly supportive of my work for ages and I really wanted to do a good job on his cover here. I've been in a bit more of an art groove the last week or two, so I messaged him asking if he'd be okay with me doing ONE MORE PASS. I forced myself to slow down and not tweak things/jump around in the process this time and I think that I FINALLY managed to get the picture I had in my head at the beginning of this job out onto the page. 

Perspective and structure's solid, no murky linework, our boy and his sword are looking handsome af... I'm glad I tried one more time with this one, and I appreciate Dylan's patience while I figured it out XD