Behind the Scenes: Horizons 1 Cover

Hail, travelers, explorers, brave adventurers! Hannah here, with a peek behind the scenes. Today we’re diving into the process of creating the gorgeous illustration that graces the cover of Horizons 1, painted by the amazing Anna Grinenko (aka tshortik aka Vex). The video above shows how the initial compositions evolved into the final artwork, but in this post I'll take you back to the very beginning....

For this inaugural issue of Horizons—and the announcement of the magazine and Wildmage Press—we knew we wanted a eye-catching art piece with bold colors, a badass winged fantasy creature that’s dragon-esque but not a traditional dragon, and an adventuring party soaring over a landscape with a dramatic horizon line.

Clara and I asked Vex to develop a variety of concepts for the Cool Winged Creature, including this one that eventually evolved into the final as we pushed it to feel more unique:

Then we iterated on all the creature concepts, experimenting with color and developing some lore for them:

These two concepts ended up coming together—the first creature’s feathered head and “eye” pattern rolled into the latter “sky whale” concept for a gentle giant accompanied by birds. The starry wings are REALLY cool, but we didn’t want any confusion with this creature and the star dragons in “Draco Ex Astris,” so there’s only a hint of that in the final.

Vex also sketched a bunch of different cover compositions with different creatures and perspectives, looking at both the full 16”x9” piece and what a crop for cover dimensions might look like. Future Horizons covers will be sized specifically for the magazine, but since this illustration is also our keyart for the launch of Wildmage Press and Horizons, we wanted extra flexibility to use it on our website, in videos, and beyond.

We ended up not going with this creature, but loved the landscape—you can see that influence in the final.

Getting closer! There’s a third extremely cool concept that I’m not sharing here—both because this post would get really really long and because we might use it at a later date. ;) 

After all this iteration, we reached an almost-final composition:

And with some more discussion of color palette (and much excitement): 

Then Vex worked some magic and spent what I can only imagine was many many hours rendering… 

Finally, with some (lots) more rendering and a little color refinement to blend in some touches of our final Wildmage Press colors … !

That’s the final! I’m putting a print on my wall (you can get prints directly from Vex’s shop here!). We are awed, delighted, and honored to work with Vex and have this gorgeous artwork define the beginning of Horizons.

The art style is painterly and not rendered down to the pixel, but there are beautiful brushstrokes and details—here are some closeups to highlight those, including the tiny adventuring party perched on the creature's neck.

The final art is attached to this post so you can use it as a desktop background, too.

A couple people have already asked if there will be game statistics for this creature, and the answer is very much yes! A stat block is coming for all you wonderful subscribers to use in your games . The one thing we don’t have for this creature yet is a name, though—so feel free to drop any suggestions in the comments!

—Hannah, Editor-in-Chief (and co–Art Director)

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