After revealing all 4 new covers for the Pacts Arcane and Otherwise series and the full art for the other books in the series, By the Pact, Scars of Stone, and Shadows Over Kaighal, today is the time to share art for the final book, Demon Siege. As always, no AI was used in the creation process.
Since Demon Siege is all about, well, a demon siege, I knew the cover would need some sort of action shot. I wasn’t trying to reflect any particular scene from the book as the characters deal with many obstacles and opponents across the city, and I wanted Kamira and Veelk together on the cover once more.
The first challenge was finding the right poses and camera angle and building the background. I thought the battlements would work well, but it took me a while to find the right models and re-texture them. Then, I was playing with the camera angles and lights, and I didn’t like the first result. Thankfully, after some tweaking, it was much more appealing.
The biggest problem was including the demonlings in the image. They are monstrous creatures with each having unique features, and I couldn’t find a good model to reflect that. In the end, I “cheated.” I do have a versatile model of a dragon that you can adjust for various features like horns, spikes, or the head shape. But demonlings have no wings, so I had to go into an editor and delete all the vertices of the wings. It left the creatures with gaping holes in their shoulders, but they finally resembled demonlings. It was possible to fix those holes in 3D, but it would require a lot of precise work, and I knew I would be altering their looks in post-work anyway, so I didn’t want to spent time on something that wouldn’t matter in the final work.
Because of the intricacy of the composition and the intended extensive post-work, this art piece also required rendering models on separate layers, and once I was done, the “fun” began. I used the same smudging technique to change the dragon models as in Shadows Over Kaighal, though this time they were to have a little more solid and less metaphorical look. And after playing around, I just handed the graphic pen to my husband—this is why I consider him the author of those covers as well, even if most of the actual work was mine. But without him and his insights, these wouldn’t have been half as good as they turned out!
And if you haven’t noticed, one demonling “disappeared” in the post-work. He just didn’t work out in the composition, so I decided to get rid of him. And since all the pieces were separate, it took a moment to remove him from the image.
With this being the last cover in Pacts Arcane and Otherwise, I hope you enjoyed this series of insights into their creation process. And if you’d like more of my 3D art, you can browse my bimonthly art posts or check my social media on Wednesdays when I post new art pieces.
