Roberto Blake | Graphic Design | The Summoner

This image was designed original for a Head to Head contest on the Advanced Photoshop forum. So far no one has answered the challenge, but if they do I will post their work here on the blog.

Mostly this image was an opportunity to take and advantage of my skill with light, shadow, and smoke effects in an interesting and purposeful way. I approach this project with the idea of a redesign for the cover of the book “The Summoner” by Gail Z. Martin, a great read by the way.

References
For references I had to look no further than my own collection of fantasy novels, which is quite extensive. I have to admit that I think some of my influence in buying them was how I evaluated the work of the graphic artist that designed the cover art. I know that might sound silly since it means I was merely judging books by their covers, but I think that the decision of what artist they allowed to represent the book may have something to do with how serious the writers or publishers took themselves. As designers we often see that the level of quality that a client is willing to accept has something to do with how much of the project they consider to be an investment, or reflection of themselves. I also decided that I wanted to revisit the idea of designing or redesigning the cover art for books in the near future.

Conception
I knew that I wanted to tell elements of the story in this image, not unlike the original cover. The premise is a young Mage Prince must reclaim his kingdom from his evil half brother (typical). I decided to focus on the elements of the main character, I wanted to convey his power, but also his somber mood toward the things he was about to face. I knew that a contrast of light and shadow effects where going to be the route to this.

The Design Process
If the determining the overall concept for the graphics and the effects and style were easy, settling on the colors and tones was much harder. I experimented with a lot of different choices but settled on a combination of teals for my palette, based mostly on how I felt they worked psychologically. I could really feel that they gave the tone of sorrow and lament that I wanted to illustrate in the characters tone, while still conveying his power, and his purpose and even a slight bit of anger.

Developing the smoke effects was fairly straightforward. I wanted to also give them some texture and worked in some particle effects with pleasing results. It was while working on the smoke effects that I decided to do some additional masking and blurring on the characters cloak and hood. I wanted to make it feel as if it were created from his magic.

The decision to incorporate the castle into the image was something I came up with early on but implemented halfway through the initial design. This was a deviation from the original cover in a big way, as was the decision to do a center based design rather than one that was right heavy. I felt it was important to remind the reader what the character was dwelling on and fighting for.

Conclsions.

I was very pleased with how the Summoner came out. I really feel that I capture the subject and conveyed the tone of the story well through this image and I feel inspired to browse my bookshelf for more projects like this.