Surprised myself!

Worked on the "cover" art for Chapter 4 of Magellan today. Technically it's a bit silly to talk about covers for a webcomic... just what are the covering anyway? I never used to do them but the publishing system used by Graphic Smash places a large "Featured today" image on the home page randomised from the titles updating on any given day - and the image is certainly large enough to qualify as a cover in my mind, so that's what it is to me and judging by most of the art produced by the other Smashers (as we call ourselves) it is to them too.

Quite honestly, I suck pretty badly at cover art, or at least I really did when I started to do them. The way I see it, a comic book cover has to encapsulate the story contained within, up the ante, draw the reader in and not give anything away all at the same time. This chapter is titled 'Bad Karma' - a reference to Karma Joffe, a key character, fairly secondary up until now but pretty much centre-stage for this story. I thought I had a good idea for the cover, but once I sketched it up it wasn't all that good, neither was the second one I scratched out. Anyway, long story short, inspiration combined with desperation and I came up with something that was a total blast to draw and (IMHO) looks pretty excellent (at any rate, I'm very happy with it).

Black and white art, followed by colour art...