the plated prisoner i: gild - cover illustration
the project
Concept
As The Plated Prisoner series by Raven Kennedy is one of my favorite fantasy romances, I wanted to have a character-based dust jacket to display on my bookshelves. After several sketches, I landed on this pose because of how well it portrays Midas' (male) possessive and manipulative behaviors towards Auren (female).
Typography
While I typically find and manipulate a font for most book cover title designs, I hand lettered this one partially for fun, and partially because I couldn't find a similar font that felt right. While illustrating, I included less detail toward the bottom of the page and ensured it was slightly darker to help the title have a space of its own that draws the eye.
Illustration
As with most of my semi-realistic digital illustrations, I started rendering with grayscale to ensure all important shapes were distinct and built out as they should be. Then, I went in with base colors and shadow/highlight colors before adding more striking highlights and details with color dodge and overlay layers.