Creating compelling cover art for a narrative work is about more than just drawing an interesting picture, it should ideally give some representation of what your audience can expect from the work. Considering the more classically inspired tone of our work, we opted for an overall layout that is common among other classic works of literary fiction in our own library.

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Concepting

As for the central image, this was a somewhat more involved process. To begin with, we had to determine what type of image would convey something about the story, communicate something about its style, and be possible for us to create with our own skills and resources. Rather than a cinematic style cover with the character’s portraits, we decided on the idea of a still life composed of noteworthy objects that would be both visually striking and play an important to the plot.

It was important to us that the objects represent multiple facets of the primary characters, so we settled on Askatla’s golden ginkgo hairpin, Prometheus’ Zygopter, Anselme’s thistle silk kerchief and a clothbound Bärenreiter score to Mozart’s masterful Opera, Don Giovanni. With the primary elements selected, Chiêu Nguyệt drew a quick sketch for the layout of those objects.

Blender

While it may not be the first tool most artists would think of for creating cover art, the rest of the work was largely done in Blender. For those not already familiar with Blender, it is an incredibly versatile open source program that can be used for all kinds of digital art, though it is probably best known for its hard surface modeling and animation capabilities.

Alexander was first introduced to Blender one of his character artist/animator colleagues while working at a game company in Tokyo. He had been discussing the modeling and animation process with the animator while trying to learn more about the various disciplines as he took on new responsibilities as a game planner. The colleague recommended that if he wanted to truly understand the process, the best way would be for him to learn at least the basics of modeling and animating for himself. While the tool of choice in the company was Maya, he recommended trying out Blender since it is completely free. This turned out to be great advice and Alexander wound up using Blender to help create concept art and animations for new assets and feature throughout his remaining time at the company.

From Modeling to Render

A lot of those same processes went into creating the cover art for Torche Tombante: Kamiumi. The first step was modeling the various elements. While most of them have fairly simple geometry, it was important to build them in a way that could be easily adapted for future use. Knowing that we planned to create a simple animation of the scene for the audiobook chapters, this meant rigging the Zygopter up with a functional armature.

With all the objects in place, materials were needed. There are two primary elements to the materials in this scene, a UV image for the opera score’s and procedurally generated materials for everything else. For the UV, Alexander used the image of a standard Bärenreiter score, altered the colouration to match the description in the story, and applied a procedural cloth texture to it. With an an HDRI of a warmly coloured interior space and a few additional lights, the scene was ready to render.

Framing and Compositing

For the remaining elements, the frame, text, and background, Alexander originally tried using GIMP, another free and open source program, but one that is used much more for image editing and compositing. While GIMP is certainly a useful program, the results simply were not providing the desired effect. The gold in the frame and the gold of the ginkgo pin do not match well and the frame around the image felt a bit plain.

The solution was a return to Blender. We decided to give the frame around the image a bit of a baroque era floral motif and to put assign both the frame and text the same gold material as the pin in the image, lending greater cohesion to the cover as a whole. As an extra touch, we decided to add a warm gold backlight to the frame and text, highlighting them on the cloth textured background. With the placement of a few scene lights to make the gilded elements pop, the background was ready to render. The frame and background element was rendered with a shadow catcher alpha plane where the still life image would sit. Finally, the two images were composited in Gimp so that the frame’s scene lighting would not effect the colour saturation of the still life.

You can see a quick rundown of this process in our making of video below: