This is one of the commissions I finished right before I ran off for vacation, a book cover for Annette Gisby’s novel Drowning Rapunzel. She originally asked for print-resolution digital art (6″x9″ with a 0.25″ bleed, a fairly standard “oversize paperback” sort of size), which I did using Corel Painter IX. During the process of having the cover made, the ebook version got picked up by an epub, who allowed her to supply her own cover.

A tiny plug, if you want to commission me for art, just drop me a line and we can discuss pricing and deadlines. Don’t be afraid that I’ll hard sell you — I only have 3 spots left in my art queue at the moment anyway.

As always, you can skip to the bottom to see the finished piece, or scroll through the “progress” to get an idea of how it all came together.

After some discussion and many photos of towers, i came up with this Incredibly Lame “sketch” just to get an idea of positioning and whatnot:

There were a few steps between that and this, but I figured I’d skip to the first real significant progress. I feel the need to point out that the tower took as long as the entire rest of the image combined, and if I never shade another tiny brick again it might be too soon. @_@ The black lines show the “bleed” area, which is what would be cut off in a print book — I personally like the full version better, so I’m glad she got to use it.

Here I properly drew in the figure of the girl, and shaded the lake:

And now, grass! Annette wanted to be sure I wasn’t going to leave our poor Rapunzel on a muddy bank, and it worked out better to have the grass layer put in before shading the trees and whatnot.

Here’s the final version, complete with titles added in Photoshop.

Click the image for a larger version