Gathox Process: The Cover Art . . . also, updates!

Today I'd like to feature a step-by-step of my construction of the Gathox cover art, which follows below. But first, I'd like to make a few brief updates as to all things going on over here at the official Gathox Home Base Headquarters Neighborhood Friendship Society (TM) (R).

Update 1: Gathox Print Edition

You can get your digital copy of Gathox Vertical Slum HERE!!!!!

Mike and I had to make some changes and modifications to the original print files we sent to OBS. Those changes are complete (we hope!!!) and a final test print is on its way to Mike's hands as we speak. If it looks good, we will be turning that live on all of the OBS sites (DriveThruRPG.com, et. al.). Anyone who bought a .pdf will be getting an email with a discount off the print copy equal to the value of what they paid for their digital copy (in this case, $10). I'm super excited!

Update 2: GVS2: Quake Alley Mayhem!

Over the last year and a half I have playtested and drafted an awesome tournament-style module for Gathox, called GVS2: Quake Alley Mayhem! It features a 'Get The McGuffin' style mission full of traps and deadly consequences, and runs on a unique timer with escalating deadliness. The manuscript for GVS2 is complete and ready for edits, and the art is almost done as well. Ideally, I'd like to have this PC-killer ready for folks by Christmas time; cross your fingers, no guarantees! Also, the custom Gathox Character Sheet is almost ready for upload to DTRPG, and will be totally free for download.

Update 3: Life Stuff

I've been fairly quiet on the blog front as well as on G+ and Fb, and for good reason. I figure that I owe you a brief explanation as to why.

First, the committed relationship I was in for the last 4+ years ended, necessitating a move to a different part of the state. I now live in a remote part of Montana with my dog, and the internet here is essentially held together with chicken bones and hope :) The upside is that I recently was able to acquire an 18' Roadrunner camp trailer (for a song, no less) which I'm converting into a full-time home and off-grid mobile art studio - and I'm super pumped!

Second, shortly after I moved, I suffered a series of illnesses which kept me from working as much as I normally do. I've since healed up and am back up to par. The uptick is that my immune system is that much stronger, and I likely won't get ill again for some time to come (knock on wood).

Third, I've been given the opportunity to write and illustrate a book for Lamentations of the Flame Princess!!!!!!!!! The book is tentatively titled, "The Goddess Who Sleeps in Bile," and features a procedurally generated hex crawl, nightmare inputs from the players, and lots of level-agnostic deadliness. The research and drafting of the book eats up lots of my time, in the best possible way.

That's it for the updates; now on to a discussion about making the cover for Gathox!!!

Gathox Process: The Cover Art

I employed a mixture of physical and digital processes to make the GVS cover come to life. My goal was to make it look as natural and physical as possible, so I simply started with pencils on a standard 11"x17" sheet of Bristol board (100 lbs., lined for comics).

As you can see, I went for a unified, single-point perspective that would let me emphasize the verticality of the city environment. I set the horizon line far enough up from the bottom of the page so that I could detail a full street battle, but not so far that I couldn't communicate the steepness of the surrounding buildings. Also, the giant head belongs to Jackie Zhao, the gear-vomiting recluse featured in the chapter fiction written by Josh Wagner. There's a tiny gear on his tongue, but I like to think it could be mistaken for a tab of acid ;)

I chose gangs and characters that featured prominently in the year-long first campaign I ran for Gathox. On the left you see early and eager versions of The Firestarters (the PCs' gang), and on the right I've begun to illustrate a one-eyed hypercapitalist Kermen warrior getting punched out.

Here, I've continued to add in more Firestarters and Kermen, as well as some mangled hirelings and a Gongwarped Fisherman (the players had a hell of a time with the Fishermen in the first campaign, and I figured they deserved a spot on the cover as well).

Here I've added to the cluster of bodies on the page with some additional FPA gangsters and a laser-shooting Zhezhn known as a Pyramid Eye (which falls squarely under the heading of "Things in Gathox Inspired by Conspiracy Culture.") It's almost ready for ink . . .

I decided to start the inking process by blacking in the border of the image. I used permanent black ink and a flat, angled brush from a pack of kids' paint brushes (like $2 at Target). Blocking in the black border helps me see everything I'm doing better and gives me some leeway when I am working close to the edges of the image - I don't have to gauge where to terminate a line and can more easily avoid tangents along the sides of the illustration.

Like a lot of my friends and colleagues, I tend to ink from top to bottom. Because I'm left-handed, I also tend to ink from right to left. This keeps my hands out of the wet stuff. As an old crew boss of mine used to say, "Keep you hands, feet, and other objects outta the shit!"

Occasionally I'll switch over to working from the outside of the image toward the middle. Sometimes this is to frame up everything outside of the subjects, sometimes it's to work in line weight variation, and sometimes I do it just to switch things up.

After I finish inking my lines, I go through and add my spot blacks, beef up line weight as needed, hatch or texture parts that scream for more detail, and find ways to clarify an image with ink. I prefer to use ink washes on most of my black and white ink drawings, but decided against that technique for the cover. First and most important, I knew I wanted to colorize this piece with as much active color as I could, and washes would dull that out. Second, and really only a minor consideration, I knew that I had to scan this drawing in four different pieces (because I have a tiny scanner), and stitching the image together with washes was going to be labor-intensive with no guarantee that it would look good.

After everything was ready to go in terms of line art, I turned my attention to color.

I cut four sheets of cold-press watercolor paper in half and applied some paint in an abstract fashion. I used kid's neon tempura paint to get those super bright colors you see above, as well as some runny washes of gouache paint. I let gravity do some of the work, taping the paper at odd angles to my tilted drafting table to dry before applying another layer. I allowed the paints to mix a bit, working sufficiently wet that my dry time was slow and the pigments could interact.

Finally, I used acrylics to paint a large abstract background. I first covered my 16"x20" canvas with Open Acrylic additive, applied thinly with a palette knife, which slows the drying time and allows me to mix colors on the canvas, wet-on-wet, like oils. I knew I wanted a light source at the top with pooled darkness below, and the patchy mix above is what I ended up with. I dig this canvas on its own and might do more of these in the future for their own sake.

The next step took a while, but I was very pleased with the results. I used the canvas painting as my background, and began cutting selections from the scans of the watercolor paper and pasting them underneath different figures in the line art. I took inspiration from the old, brightly colored plastic toy action figures you could buy in bulk at the dollar store, and did my best to make the figures brighter than the background. Finally, I took several passes at shading and highlighting all the figures and surfaces digitally, paying attention to whether or not I was obliterating too much of the natural texture and detail from the color scans.

To finish the cover off, I got the print specs from Mike, built a template in Inkscape, imported my artwork, and built the graphics. I had made font choices for the book long before I finished the cover, so it was more a matter of toying with the fonts and box elements to get everything looking nice. I decided I didn't want to cover any of the art up with text, and given that Gathox is, well, vertical, I figured that a vertical title bar would fit nicely with everything else. Oh, and also neon green, because neon fucking green, that's why.

Cheers!