This is the scan of the final “real world” version of the Detour cover art. The color for most of my illustrations is added in Photoshop. That way I have more flexibility if I need to make corrections. For me, working with color is a tricky business. I’m still learning what colors work well together, which clash and the difference between too many colors and not enough. With Photoshop I can experiment with different colors and compositions until I find the best looking one.

The original art is usually done in ink and graphite. I lay down the areas I want to be solid black with a brush and india ink and then add tones with a B weight pencil. Lately I’ve been using gray tone markers as well. The markers add variety to the textures in the illustration.

I’m interrupting the Oz Squad posts to throw some attention at another project I worked on recently – the resurrection of the Dark Conspiracy RPG. 3Hombres Games are the folks producing both new and revised material. Their first release – Detour – went live on Friday at drivethrustuff.com.

Over the next few days I’ll be posting the rough sketches of the illustrations I did for this supplement. The final art is available in the product.

Today’s post is of the really rough sketch for the cover. I usually do three or four thumbnail sketches for a possible cover and submit them to my editors to choose from. In this case I did a number of really bad, barely comprehensible sketches that made no sense to anyone but me, finally came up with this one and, fortunately, the editors liked it.