Animal Kingdom

For this blog, I decided to talk about the cover I did for Iain Rob Wright’s Animal Kingdom. The book was published by Grand Mal Press and is in stores now, but I've been getting a lot of requests asking how I went about creating the cover. It's actually quite straightforward, and came together rather voraciously once I knew the direction. Like all my illustrations, it all starts out as a sketch. I was originally asked to paint animals, specifically a monkey attacking the city. Drivers, pedestrians, pretty much anyone walking around during the night. The focus was on what would happen if a crazed guerrilla attacked a motorist. Just the fear someone would endure during the attack, their sight and their emotions consumed my thoughts. The first sketch was put the viewer behind the driver so we could see the initial point of impact. Thankfully this was accepted and I got to move forward.

For this piece I didn't do my normal fully realized drawing, instead I blocked in simple shades of black, whites, and grays. This allowed me to frame my picture for the details that were to come. One thing I had to keep in mind was that the top and bottom needed space for print, therefore they were left dark. I also had to remember that this story took place in the UK so the driver had to be on the right. This process only took about two hours at the most. Now that I look back at it, I am quite proud of the representation using the little amount of detail. Once this step was done I was ready to move on to the fun stuff, rendering.

Still just using black-and-whites, I started adding texture. The first focus was trying to get the glass of the windshield to look smashed as well as cracked. Since windshields do not crack cleanly when struck with a baseball bat per se, I needed to make sure that the fracture lines resignation from the central spot the skull struck the car. As I was doing that, I also added more detail to the guerrilla such as pushing the values in the face, texture in the hands, and really starting to make the fur look like fur.

After a couple hours of rendering, everything had been completed except the rain, which was my next step. It was actually quite simple adding white paint and blending it to look appropriate, tricky part was trying to get the rain drops to run down the windshield. Once that was done and everything was in place, the under painting had been completed as shown. Next was the finishing touches, oh and color.

Since I had already done a couple color studies, as well talked it over with the art director, I knew exactly where my colors would be placed. I went pretty traditional with the guerrilla and the red blood, but I wanted to give that photo filter, night glow/streetlight look so I decided to put the orange as my secondary light. After some fine tweaking we have our finished painting.

I hope you all enjoy this little walk through, this cover was a blast to do and I'm really really happy with the results. If anybody has any questions feel free to leave me a comment or if you want to buy animal kingdom please check out our store. Thanks so much for reading and I will see you guys later.