When I was a kid, my brothers and I drew and recreated our favourite Marvel and DC superheroes in black-and-white pencil shading. In particular, it was my brother George (who, incidentally, also inspired my dive into reading science fiction and fantasy books) whose re-creations were the most detailed. Where my other brother and I just copied and redrew what we saw on the comic page, George expanded upon and added such rich imagery that we were all convinced he’d be an artist one day.
Years later, using YouTube tutorials and experimenting on my own, I’m finally able to take inspiration from images to create my own detailed drawings. If you read my first series, The Mage’s Cradle, you’d have seen that each novel in the three-part series has either maps or scenery that I drew. No, they will not win any awards, but developing them did help me think through what the worlds were like. Examples of my work from those novels can be seen below:
When it came to The Root of Infinity, I had a tough time deciding on a front cover. Now, I would love to have the funds to hire a designer, but after paying for a professional editor and continuing to spend money on advertising, my best bet was to purchase images on sites like canva.com and use their software to design unique book covers. Yet, no combination of images truly rang true for me or represented what I had in mind. So, I returned to my pencil-shaded drawings. Over the past few months, I’ve tried drawing different images. Here is one of my favourites, and my first drawing:
I almost used this one to take forward. If you look carefully, two planets are hanging in the night sky. I will have this somewhere in the novel, but as a cover, it was too busy. So what did I end up with?
I redrew the version on the left, showing the Boundless tree in profile instead of head-on. I then tried my hand at drawing planets and stars. One of the planets, Orre to be precise, can be seen in both drawings. As I said above, I will definitely not win any awards. Still, both these initial drafts gave me a starting place. When combined, they became what you see below.
This image spoke to me and became the one that I took forward. (Hmm… I still need to fill in the top right corner. Oh well)
By adding colours, substituting the planet Orre for the more dramatic world of Dormall (the red planet), and playing with form, it became the basis of what I was happy with. Add text and a few other images with canva.com, and that’s how I got here.
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