SHALLOW SLEEP - cover illustration + logo

Hello hello my gemlins~! 

I proudly present the final cover for Shallow Sleep! 💜 I don't redraw old art often but it was pretty incredible to see the difference between my vision for this cover from 2018 vs the one today, haha.

Once again, here is the old version for comparison:

I'd also like to talk a bit about some of the choices I made for this cover and also a bit about the logo! 

The old illustration only existed in the format you can see above, for the new one I decided to go with a format that'd work nicely as a book cover too, in case I ever decided to do a print run.

The lanterns weren't there at the beginning, but I felt like the left side just looked kind of empty, and that there was some contrast missing:

Everything was just very blue/purple.

I wanted to bring the pinkish red of Charon's brooch back into the illustration somehow and then remembered that in the comic itself, there will be lanterns throughout the underworld caves, not only lighting the way for the deceased but also for the Keepers.

It made sense to bring them back for the cover illustration!

My friend then suggested to go "full Fatal Frame" and include red butterflies and I immediately went "ohhhhhhhh that's my favourite Fatal Frame!!", so I had to do it!

For reference: In Fatal Frame 2: Crimson Butterfly, lanterns+shiny red butterflies are a big theme and since the games deal with Death a lot, it seemed fitting to pay homage to the franchise and indeed go "full Fatal Frame", hehe.

(if you like Japanese horror and haven't tried out Fatal Frame/Project Zero yet, I highly recommend playing or watching a Let's Play!! [Gab Smolders is a very good choice for the latter])

So yea, that's how we ended up with this current cover illustration : D I hope you like it!

Now, as for the logo:

As you may have noticed, I haven't really had any logos for any of my series before, I usually just...... type the title in one way or another and call it a day LOL

But I've seen so many webcomics have really cool logos over the years and I wanted one too! However, this type of stuff isn't really my forte, so I struggled a lot. Some of my early drafts looked like this:

These are all from April of this year.

Even just coming up with a general vibe was such a struggle, I had no idea how to approach this, which is embarrassing because I went to school for this type of work HAHA

After that I didn't touch any of my logo ideas until late October, when I realised that elaborate, detailed, swirly logo design (which a lot of webcomics have!) is not something I'm into at all, I like clean, simple graphics and clean, simple fonts and if I design a logo I want it to be recognisable even as a small thumbnail.

The very next drafts were these:

And the second one is basically the finished version already XD It's not perfect, actual logo designers might feel like bleaching their eyes after seeing it, but I'm quite happy with it for now! Maybe in the future I'll go back and edit it a bit, but for its current purpose it works quite nicely.

Also, maybe I should mention that the graphic itself is a representation of a soul; we usually see them as glowy orbs in the comic, but they do change shape at a certain point, which is why this one looks different :3

I think that's most of my thoughts in regards to art and design choices 🤔

If you read all this, thank you! Good job, getting thru all my ramblings, haha. I hope it was a little bit interesting!

Tomorrow I'll share the chapter 01 cover for Morganite gemlins, and then the day after....... COMIC BEGIN aaaaa