Last week, I shared the four new covers for Pacts Arcane and Otherwise series, and today, I’m revealing the first of four art pieces I created as the base for them and sharing some insights how I created them.

If you’ve been following my weekly 3D art posts on social media or the bimonthly blog updates, you already know that for the last few years I’ve been teaching myself 3D art. While I can’t sculpt my own 3D models myself yet, there are plenty of talented artists who sell their models, so I bought what I needed from them. Along with setting the poses, expression, clothing, and proper lighting in the 3D software also came the need to brush up my 2D skills, especially post-work to enhance the images. No AI was used in any part of the process.

As I also wanted to update the print versions and add hardcovers, I started by creating a wide art image, part of which would become the cover of the ebook (and front cover for print), and the rest would serve as wrap around art on the book’s print versions.

My first attempts weren’t bad, but I didn’t love them, especially when it came to finer details of how the light interacted in the image with objects, so with my husband’s suggestions, I experimented some more, not only with the general setup and lighting but also going in and changing Veelk’s clothing, adjusting minor things in the poses…

Then, I finally had something I liked, so it was time for the tedious process of rendering the elements of my 3D setup separately, so that I had better control of them in the post work. Believe me, while it’s possible to work on a flat 2D image and still achieve great results, it’s much easier to have all the elements on separate layers from the start, so you can put something behind a character if you want to without having to meticulously separate them from their background. It also means that you can work with shadows, brightness, saturation, and many other elements of digital artwork individually for each part of the image. So you can brighten one thing without making others too bright, or you can tone the contrast down when it’s too strong in one place but perfect in the others, and so on. Rendering in pieces and having layers in your graphic software grants you larger control over every part. And that becomes important when you want to adjust lights or merge 2D fog, created with brushes and overlays, with the 3D fog from the render itself.

While it was fun, the cover art took me over a week to finish, and then some days to get the typography right. And the follow up covers… Each of them was more complex and demanding… but that’s the topic for other posts. Stay tuned for more art reveals!