Horth at Moon Shadow

This is a cover (and it may get revisions, I don't know yet) for an upcoming novella (in paperback) by Craig Bowlsby. It's an adventure story set in the Okal Rel universe of Lynda Williams, where Horth Nersal (as a junior Navy officer) crash-lands on a remote, crumbling space station-- and discovers it's very much inhabited...and not friendly. When the Okal Rel property was owned by Hades Publications, I did a few of the covers in the series, and there is a format--a single character on a geometric background for each title.

Lynda Williams has bought back the property and is planning on re-issuing the books; so they should be easier to find in the US-- so I wanted to keep the "look" the same as the previous series, but make the design more a natural part of the image instead of a designer pattern overlaid on the image.

I had several challenges on this one--first off, I just had no reference--I tried setting up a Poser figure to get a general idea of the lighting, but that was a fail as I couldn't get the 3d lights to behave naturally, and I couldn't find any stock in my files that matched the pose or the light. I did find a slurpee cup lid for the window, but that was it. So I did a pretty complete sketch to base the final on:

This was all done in CS3--Photoshop runs clean and fast even on a limited Windows machine, and I can customize the brushes to emulate the watercolors and acrylics I used to paint with. (I turn down the opacity to about 50% on most of the brushes). I don't use filters or scans if I can help it--the "machine" parts of the image often look jarringly different from the hand-painted stuff without a lot of correcting and overpainting, so usually it's easier just to paint whatever I need instead of trying to comp it in. I still like to have photos as reference--I am not good at picturing reflected light and shadow intensity in my head. If I can sneak it in, I like to add some unexpected color here and there; I am a big fan of Wayne Thiebaud:

Look how cool that looks. Also the man himself:

That is mostly orange, ultramarine, white and black..and it looks great. I want to paint like him when I grow up. :D