Front Cover

Book Cover

I have been asked to create a cover for the book I am illustrating, I have the choice between creating a cover for the Necronomicon or the book within that book that I illustrated called Dagon. I have chosen to illustrate the cover for Necronomicon.

Here is my beloved copy of the Necronomicon. On the cover is a gold embossed Cthulhu, this is because Cthulhu is the most famous of Lovecrafts dark creations. 

As Cthulhu is most well known I thought putting him on my cover would be a good idea. 

Here are some rough sketches of a few ideas that popped in to my head, I am mostly looking at the ideas of using Lovecrafts face, and incorporating some of his creatures. Most of my sketches gravitate around the idea of Cthulhu. 

I decided I wanted to draw Lovecraft's face with a tentacle coming out of his head, I drew a few sketches to test where the tentacles should come out and I decided out of the eye would look the most intriguing. 

Mr H.P Lovecraft himself!

A practice sketch of Lovecrafts face. 

Finnished and outlined. 

As I wanted the majority of the piece to be black and white as it would go with the book I used fineliner, but when it came to the tentacle I thought it would look better with some colour so here is a page where I tested different colours of Brusho. I tested Leaf Green, Emerald Green and Turquoise. I came to the decision that Turquoise would not suit the tentacle, and picked Leaf Green as the most suited. 

I used leaf green for the base and the eye of Lovecraft. 

For the rest of the tentacle I needed another colour that would go with the Leaf Green so I tested on the same page so that I could see if it would match. I decided to go with Yellow Brusho as I thought it would compliment the green well. 

Here is the almost finished piece, I will be working in to the tentacle more with pen and I will scan it in to edit and complete. I am going to look at different ideas for a background, and test what will compliment the piece best. I think maybe, a faint hand written text of extracts from the book?