ooh, do you have any tips on doing fan wc covers? for example what size do you make them in, what font do you use, etc? your covers are very inspiring, it makes me want to try doing something like that too! im just... not sure where to begin
I’ve got a more comprehensive tutorial in the works but my process of doing them is basically have the bg be more background/location focused, ie a lakeshore meeting or walk through the forest, and the cat head be one of the main characters. Technically they are just an A4 size (depends on ur programme i think) and the text font is Source Serif Pro Semibold. The brushes are clip studios Gouache, Dry Gouache and Thin Gouache Brush. Gouache for blocking, dry for rocks and fur blending, thin for details. Regarding the actual composition of the covers... this might get long.
I’m a huge unironic fan of the skew-iffness of McLoughlin’s cats- the wrong eye colour, wrong description, round faces, weird eye and muzzle shapes, etc in the covers and Ultimate Guide. It’s charmin as fuck. For his background’s he’s honestly a master of colour. His red rocks have yellows, creams, gray-greens and blues. His green trees are yellow, blue, orange and indigo. His snow is pale blue, purple, green, or orange and red and white. Go wild with the colours on the first pass. Check out his other work as well for a better sense of this, he’s got a great American sense of the huge outdoors, (despite being born in the UK- he’s welsh but served in Vietnam. Anyway) it’s kinda reminiscent of Romanticism in a way and the series took a huge L in not hiring an artist to replicate this sense of grandeur and reverence for the outdoors for the new covers and chose to focus on the actual cats in a very safe way. I actually love McLoughlin’s work for I’m bias. His ammunition adverts are great lol im so gettin a print. Back to the actual covers. Pick a scene of the book, sketch in, keep the focus mainly in the bottom 1/3. The top can slack on detail due to the title and cat head. I like to give my covers a sense of cohesion- you can look at it without a title and know it is from X series (ie my New Dawn covers follow a rainbow colour, a WIP set of covers i have all have a shot of a lake in them, my TGL covers all focus on the sky) Where the fuck am i going with this? Tips. Pick a good scene that sums up the story- ie Rising Storm has Fireheart by the Thunderpath with Tigerclaw watching him. Keep colours strong, the natural colours are always amplified, shadows blue/purple, rarely use black. The rough pass is usually one layer for me and then i paint above that. I try use as little layers as possible to keep a “traditional one canvas one layer” feel. Cats/figures in the background have a lot of different colours on them- yellow, blue, red, etc. Fur detail is suggested with texture. Same with the background. No smooth gradients, use a brush to make gradients. Light and shadow are amplified. Highlights are a bit unnatural but make sense. Honestly just draw it. There’s no real ‘tutorial’ to it. Just throw urself into it and get the cover down! If you have any more specific questions please ask me! Or just come talk about why the mcloughlin covers are better. Idk. Enjoy a bear watching a basketball hoop in a forest.
















