Book Cover Fanart--the Last Unicorn

So I'm posting AGAIN this week. I'll never be able to keep this rate of posting up, but I just have this awesome new toy that I am trying out. I finished the Lonely Dragon comic on my shiny new Tablet Monitor (much more quickly than I would have with my tablet), and then Experimented in Photoshop with my Rockwell master copy. Time to head back to my program of choice, doing my favorite kind of art--fanart. (Because really, fan art was the reason I got into illustration in the first place.)

The Last Unicorn has been on my TBR list for quite awhile, but it was only a couple weeks ago that I decided to really buckle down and read it. Since this is not a book review I won’t get into what I liked and didn’t like about it, I’ll just say this: one of the things I really liked about it was the very strong imagery. I’m an illustrator, we like things that make great images. So of course after reading any book with great imagery, my immediate first reaction is to create fanart.

I decided on creating my own book cover, so I did put some text on it. I’m no graphic designer though, so the text isn’t really my strong suit. (You’ll see in the progress photos that I changed my mind about the font halfway through.)

When this image was in my head, I felt really strongly that the outlines of the Red Bull needed to be yellow. I did not, however, want the outlines of anything ELSE to be yellow. Since I have never used more than one outline color for any of my linework-based illustrations, this piece was highly experimental in that way.

Compositionally, I wanted the image to be able to work without text, but still have the most important stuff going on within a kind of square that the text wouldn’t have to cover up. I think this worked out pretty well.

I tried my best to put text on there in a readable and attractive way, but, as I said, I'm no graphic designer.

I'm pretty happy with how it came out. I learned a lot on this piece, and tried a lot of new things.