Cry Havoc - Cover Process
Given that the collected edition of Cry Havoc has been released, I wanted to do a quick process post showing how I worked on the main covers with the insanely talented (and patient) Ryan Kelly. We knew we wanted the series to tie in across the six issues, and that we wanted to feature one of the mythological creatures from each issue on the cover, kind of Monster of the Week style. I’d already designed the logo and worked out its positioning along with the credits and other cover dress whilst working on the first cover image. We went through several rounds which probably deserves its own post. For now, I’m focusing on the cover for issue 6.
1. Inks
First up Ryan would send over his sketches and then raw ink files, this is the gorgeous work he did of character Sri.
2. Compilation
Next up, I take Ryan’s inks and put them into a file I set up at final print size. We decided to do a series of full wraparound covers (front and back) for the comic, so I took pieces of Ryan’s inks, duplicated smaller bits, masked out other bits and repositioned them until I was happy with the placement across the cover and under the logo and credits.
3. Colour
I approached colour quite differently from how I normally would given how textured Ryan’s inks were, instead starting with a basic colour gradient map to get the right balance of tones from the black and white inks. For the colours, we wanted something that worked across the whole series and that best worked with each creature. The Penanggalan, Sri’s character, is pretty horrific as she’s basically a head with her stomach and entrails trailing behind her, but Ryan’s inks were so beautiful and almost looked like roots so I wanted to push that deception further. I figured soft pink tones would not only undermine the horror tones of the book, but they’d also subtly hint at the fleshy colours of the guts themselves. It ended up feeling much more Japanese cherry blossoms to me than disemboweled nightmare.
4. Depth
Despite the amazing tone and shading in Ryan’s inks, I felt the basic gradient maps needed a little work to really boost the image, so I then added my own grey tones layer to balance out the background and add more depth.
5. Colour and Depth
I usually worked with the colour layer switched on to see how the grey tones built up.
6. Alternatives
Whilst I constantly checked the image worked with the cover dress (logo, credits, etc.) as I went, I inevitably spent a while at the end tweaking the gradient map to check alternatives. For this one I worked up several quite lurid options, one of which we used for the variant cover to better match up with Sean Phillips’ amazing art.
7. Final Cover
Here’s the final cover wrap:
