Dark Crystal Age of Resistance cover: Ordon

Archaia is publishing a new Dark Crystal comic series that ties in with the Netflix show Age of Resistance and I was asked to do some variant covers for it!

The series will be broken into three 4 issue arcs, and the first arc is all about the character Ordon.

To the left you can see the finished cover, but below I'll break down all the steps I took to create the cover artwork.



Sketches:
I started by reading the outline of the comic series given to me by Archaia as well as some character and show info from Henson. Besides the main character of this arc Ordon, I decided to include the following elements for the cover: The Skeksis skekVar the General, the Dual Glaive, an Arathim, and the Gelfling village of Stone in the Wood.

I used a stock photo of a samurai to get Ordon's pose, and then on copy paper and my Huion lightpad, I was able to build up pencil drawings of the other elements that would puzzle piece together in the next step...



Layout:
I scanned all my pencil drawings and put them together in one composition. By having every character/element on a different layer, I was able to resize, mirror, and make adjustments until the composition worked. I did a quick color treatment to the whole piece so it would help me see the various forms and how I'd tone them so that they could all be seen without forming into one blobby mass. The orange borders here represent the live area, trim, and bleed lines.

This was then sent in to Archaia and Henson for them to approve before I could move on.


Inks:
When the layout was approved, I printed it out (it takes two sheets of copy paper taped together to get it to the size I need) and taped it to the back of a sheet of 300 series 11"x17" Strathmore Bristol. Then on my Huion light pad, I can see through the surface of the bristol down to my layout to use as a guide when I'm inking. This way I keep all pencil graphite off of the finished inkwork with no need to erase.

I inked with Copic Multiliner SP pens (The 0.7 nib mainly). I was careful to not butt the inklines of the forms against each other to help give a sense of depth and also so life would be easier in the next step...


Color Flats:
The inks were approved while I was away at GenCon, but as soon as I got home, I started setting up my digital file for color. This step is called Color Flatting, named so because of the flat, hard-edged color layers you are laying down to establish what areas are which colors. Because this piece had so much depth, I also established all the color holds (areas where I want the ink-lines to be a color other than black) and made sure to separate out the linework of the Froud-ian circle design, the Skeksis, Ordon, the Arathim, the village, and the crystal.




Final colors:
The final rendering was done using mostly the dodge and burn tools in Photoshop with a stock textured brush. I did do a bit of painting on Ordon's face to get a little more control over the shading and planes of his visage.

Dark Crystal Age of Resistance #1 will be out in comic shops Sept. 25th.
Use comicshoplocator.com to find a comic shop near you.






2019 Appearances
New York Comic Con October 3-6
Baltimore Comic Con October 18-20
The Fantastic Workshop Nov. 13-18