After revealing all 4 new covers for the Pacts Arcane and Otherwise series and the full art for By the Pact, today I’m sharing full art for book 2 in the series, Scars of Stone.

Once more, I started with the wide image to have wrap around art for print versions of the book. This time, the concept took some brainstorming as I initially wanted to keep it in the same vein as book 1, the characters together, but in different poses and environment, but I quickly realized it wasn’t working. So while I was hesitant to only have Kamira on the cover and choose for the images within the series not to match closely, I went in that direction, focusing on depicting one of the aspects of the story that is prominent in this book and a particular scene in the cavern.

That’s why I was trying to include a crystal with a demonling trapped in it—not the huge one with Veranesh that was the focus of book 1 on the old cover, but a smaller one. Yet again, the design was just not working. It was hard to find the right model for the crystal and materials to make it both solid enough to look like crystal and translucent enough so that the creature within would be visible, and to get it right required too much light which made the color scheme unappealing to me.

So, my invaluable husband stepped in once again and suggested another direction, a symbolic one rather than depicting. I went with different light and color schemes. I had some models of magic circles, but none seemed to work to my satisfaction, so I settled on adding the circle in post-work. To make sure all elements worked together, I added lights in the 3D render coming from the place where the circle would be, so that Kamira’s model looked like it was lit by it. This is a trick I often use when I know I will be adding things in post-work to make them mesh together better in the final image.

Once I found the right brush to use for the circle, perfect with its dragonfly in the middle as nightflies in my world resemble it, and with Kamira having two crystal ones to communicate with Veranesh, it added to the symbolism. Then it was time to put all the pieces together. Fun fact: since the original design had actual words in it, I spent quite some time breaking up the letter shapes to make them look like random symbols rather than English words as it made sense for a fantasy world.

In the end, I loved how this one turned out. It also seems to be the readers’ favorite, and I can see why. The next two covers turned out much more of a challenge, so stay tuned for the next reveal and the story!