The cover creative process

Sometimes ideas pop into your head at 4 in the morning and you think “I need to put this down on paper or risk losing it”. Its the classic conundrum where you weigh up sleep versus creativity.
This happened to me recently and is the story of how we got our mock up cover. On our last monthly meet up I was talking with Emma, Ryan and Robert about the fact that we needed a mock up cover. This could be our final cover or serve as a placeholder until we had one that was suitable.

I started thinking about it and there were a few things that I wanted to highlight:
* That comic creation is a collaborative process
* That we have more women attending the meet ups than men.
* I wanted it to be catchy

I started racking my brain about what to do and that evening spurned on by the2 pints I had had at the Wig and Pen I started to draw and....nothing. Well nothing I liked.
So off to bed no good would come of sitting in the loungeroom past mid night ferociously sketching. Then at 4am it happened. I had the idea of what to do.
I got up, my girlfriend thinking it was because I needed to go to the bathroom, and sketched out the idea on a page.

After a long day of work, I should point out I did not return to bed after I was done, I then played around with drawing it in Black and White- I was not happy with the results.

The sketch had a fluidity that was missing from this piece. So I decided to add colour.

I essentially tried adding colour to the piece as it was. I began to look at it and I HATED IT! It wasn’t what I wanted. Sometimes this happens.
I said to myself how do you want this to look on the page?

And how do you want it to look on the stands? This was a more important question as a cover need to be striking.

I decided that I’d take a stab at painting it with a brush. No pencil lines. No Safety net. What I was wanting to do was to get a sketchy feel to it, buuuuut mostly I was wanting to warm up to tackle to final piece.

What I ended up with was the final piece. I was happy with it- to the most part and hit send to my fellow contributors.
Sometimes you get an idea at 4am and sometimes you just have to let go and just have fun with it.