Project - Verse Infernal cover art

I was recently approached by Mr. Murray and Ms. Waytz about doing some cover art for a book of collected dark poetry they have been compiling. Mind you I’m still somewhat in the throes of getting settled in the new apartment and haven’t really set up an actual studio space yet, so my media options would have to be limited to what I could easily do in the space available.

That made the choice of charcoal and colored pencil, in the interests of not having to reckon with anything that could potentially make a mess of the existing space and being easy cleanup, and I really just love the way charcoal works on top of parchment paper.

In terms of aesthetic direction, Mr. Murray was leaning in kind of a minimalist or Art Nouveau kind of direction, but leaving much of the substance to me to figure out. That worked out fine, since I had been binging on one of my witch house playlists for the last several weeks and so I was already in that kind of aesthetic head space.

Once the actual drawing was done, most of the rest of the cover elements and color corrections were done in my photo editing software. I probably could have saved some time and just done the whole thing digitally from the beginning, but I kind of prefer working in physical media as much as I can.