As they have for the last few years, the folks a Wide Awake Press are putting out a free dowloadable comic for Free Comic Book Day this year.  For last year’s issue, Ancient, I was–alas–only able to do a spot illustration.  This year, though, I was offered the cover, and of course snapped it up.  This year’s theme is things medieval and magical, and the title is “Jabberwacky.”  After a bit of back and forth with editor J. Chris Campbell, we decided on a basic Jabberwocky -derived image: a knight with a magical sword fending off some sort of giant beast.  For anyone what’s interested, here’s how the process went start to finish:

We’d decided to have the monster be out of the composition and maybe just suggested via shadows and/or a little bit of a claw, tail, or whatnot.  I think Chris had in mind that the knight would be running toward the viewer with the monster behind.  For whatever reason, I instinctively had him facing us with the viewer sort of “cast” as the monster.  Here are my initial thumbnails:

I liked the aerial view (#3), but I thought it made the figure too small and the creature appear too big–so I went with the middle rough above.  It seemed like a good compromise between the first rough which is ground level and framed pretty close to the figure, and that third aerial view.  As is my usual practice these days, I just scanned the rough, enlarged it, turned it all to a light blue, and printed it out to work on further.  I used orange, red, and finally a regular lead pencil to work over the image and tighten it up:

At this stage, though, the overall composition was bugging me.  I realized that the source of the problem was that the elements of the scene were forming two nearly-symmetrical  “layers” that were sort of stacked on top of one another in a visually uninteresting way.

So, after scanning the image, I moved some things around in Photoshop to try to create a more interesting composition.  Once that was completed, I once again turned the whole thing to light blue and then did my final pencil drawing over that.  Here’s the pencil stage both with the compositional changes highlighted and without:

From this point onward, it was a fairly straight-ahead process.  I’d printed the final turned-blue image on two-ply bristol board that my printer only chokes on about 50% of the time, and then penciled on that.  I did the inking with various G-pen nibs, then scanned and colored in Photoshop:

At this point, though, the project moved from being solely mine to being one that involved…

Teamwork!  So, off it went to J. Chris Campbell for a little tweaking.  He “texturized” things a bit, using these images for the ground and sky areas of the cover:

Then, finally, J. Chris added this fantastic hand-drawn lettering from fellow WAPpie,  Dustin Harbin.  Here’s the final cover for the Wide Awake Press Free Comic Book Day issue, “Jabberwacky“:

The original art for this is for sale here.