THE CREATIVE PROCESS- PAINTED COVERS #2

In addition to my interior pencil art, I sometimes get the opportunity to work on a painted comic book cover. This doesn't happen all the time, so when  it does it's a very special event. In a previous post I showed the process of creating a cover for AC Comics. This one looks at it from a different perspective.

Erica Schultz is a brilliant writer of M3, a modern day international spy book that she and comics great Vicente Alcazer created. Although Vicente does all the interior art, the covers have been done by such talents as Bill Sienkiewicz, Andree Maitland, Chris Notarile, Rick Buckler, Jayel Draco, and Nouri Zander. Erica asked me to do a cover as well.

Instead of being a random image like the Gargantarama cover, this one was story specific. My cover was to appear on issue number 9. I started working on it by rereading all the previous issues of M3 as well as scripts for issues 8 & 9. And then I thought and sketched. I sent a series of thumbnails to Erica and Vicente for approval.

 The second image was chosen as the winner and I did a detailed pencil.

Erica and Vicente had a specific person in mind for the faces, so  I did a black and white gouache paintings of the reference:

 Once approved, I moved forward on the final color painting.

M3 is a fantastic book. The first trade paperback and single issues, including #9 (featuring this cover), can be found HERE