I recently shared my process for designing the cover of The Restless Sands of Neel, and today I thought I might take a look into the steps I took for the next book in the series, The Cursed Halls of Kalecen.
This ended up being the final cover:
I had a lot of fun with this story, since it deals with an immortal creature known in Cirena as a chesnathé.
Long story short, they’re this world’s version of a unicorn… except they’re a mix of the European unicorn and the Asian qilin, so chesnathéme are known for either judging their victims as guilty and killing them by spearing the guilty party’s heart with their horn, or determining they’re innocent and, (if “pure of heart”), granting them immortality.
Thing is, one of the Cirenan gods, Kalecen, has a broken horn and his sense of justice is… skewed. Technically a god of justice, he’s more a god of revenge.
So when the student of a protective duelist, Hahven,foils a revenge plot and incurs the wrath of Kalecen, it’s up to Hahven to shield her from the god’s harsh judgement.
For the cover, I wanted to depict Hahven facing off with Kalecen, but the first few images I rendered seemed far too static, so I ultimately ended up adding the god’s blood-thirsty champion to the picture… and I liked the result a lot better.
Here’s a few of the in-progress pictures:
I used Daz Studio to model the images, and it took several tries before I was finally happy with how it looked. (And a few days of running renders at night to give it enough time to render at a large size without being grainy). The images above are the raw renders, before I took them into Photoshop.
A: The first version. I used atmospheric lighting, which I liked, but it was too dark and Hahven’s pose seemed too static. Not exciting enough.
B. Different lighting method (no atmosphere), and I tweaked the pose so that he would be facing Kalecen better, but it was still missing something. Too static.
C. Added in Kalecen’s champion. Now he’s facing off with her… and he is supposed to be level headed, but… (can you guess what I’m going to say here?) Still too static.
(Noticing the trend?)
D. Brightened the scene a bit more and changed Hahven’s pose. Much more dynamic… but forgot to use DForce on the clothes to get them to lay naturally. Not a fan of the lighting. Also, accidentally angled the camera wrong and ended up with the purple blotch where the floor ended.
E. DForced Hahven’s clothes and now they lay properly. Also added the atmospheric lighting back (but with higher brightness levels). After changing the angle, I was much happier with the result. He’s benefitting from one of the roof’s lights, and it’s also much more dynamic. Plus… shiny reflection, even if you don’t get to see much of it on the actual cover do to the typography.
Ultimately I decided to zoom in so he’d be closer on the cover, but version E was the one I ended up Photoshopping. 🙂
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Read The Cursed Halls of Kalecen and root for a duelist fighting an unhinged god of justice…
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Happy reading and writing! 📚
Stephanie Flint - Author and Artist 