Where does a cover come from?
The cover has to sell the story by telling one of its own. It has to ask a question, one that the viewers can't resist. Crack Babies Issue 01 is a story about one person, Nadja. What kind of person is she, and how can she be used to symbolize the story?
One of my favorite resources is The Sartorialist, in which photographer Scott Schuman documents the multitude of fashions he encounters in cities around the world. As art students, you spend years working from nudes, but most of the time we move through the world wearing clothes, and to avoid falling into repetition, you have to be constantly exposing yourself to new fabrics and fashions.
In Schuman's book "Closer" I found an image of a woman wearing a fur coat, leaning against a railing, that somehow seemed to speak Nadja to me. Her up-tilted face spoke of a haughty pride that would persist in spite of a harsh and desperate world. Using that as my inspiration, I acquired a model and a fur coat, and spent several hours developing a pose.
Thus, the preliminary pencils for the cover of Crack Babies, Issue 01 I used my mechanical pencil with the Pilot Color Eno, Non-Repro blue leads. They work pretty well, but they require some adaptation, which I'll certainly go into further in a later post, but briefly, they are much more fragile than equivalent leads in graphite, and (not surprisingly) much lighter. I spent the first few months using them being frustrated by how difficult it was to see the lines I was laying down, and honestly, I'm still not thrilled by them, but they definitely beat having to erase pencils!
I'm planning on trying out a couple more options before I settle on these for good, but for the moment:
With the coat in a pile in front of me on the drawing table, I was able to develop a believable texture
And here's the final scanned image.
Next up, coloring, compositing, and developing all the graphic elements for the cover.
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