Another of the farewell pictures as Dylan Dolphin leaves the story

Two-page spread, Mexican circus tents in the background

Today I drew this rough sketch showing Dylan Dolphin leaving the story. The background took the most time. I’ve redrawn those tents half a dozen times. To make sure the tents didn’t distract the reader, I de-saturated the background colors, removed the black line work, and gave everything a dose of Gaussian blur.

Since this is a two-page spread, I’ll have to deal with Betty’s arm passing through the spine page margins. That will create a 3/8in gap in her arm as it goes from the right page to the left.

Layering Together the Foreground and Background

Today I completed cleaning up the foreground layer of my book cover image. It took about three days of scrubbing to remove the opaque white background — that’s about three hours. It’s not really that much time — it just seemed longer. I added in a potential background layer just for fun. I’m thinking that the background needs to be toned down, perhaps desaturated, darkened, blurred.

The really good news is that my mind has leapt forward one notch — I’m starting to think about parting with $295 for ten ISBN numbers. That’s going to be an all-in commitment.

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