Once the rough sketch had been approved I started putting in detail. For those who care about such things, the preliminary sketching was done first with a 2H lead and tightened with an HB. The “final” pencils here were being laid down with a B lead.

Further adjustments. While ghouls are not the sort of creatures you want to mess with and while they will attack the living, on the whole, ghouls are the dirty lazy bums of the Cthulhu Mythos. They’re carrion eaters. So I was asked to have the ghouls pay more attention to their meal and to have any ghouls who are noticing their human observer but more curious and less confrontational. Our human was asked to be horrified by what she was seeing but not yet swinging her pick around.

A third draft. Ghouls have been both been added to the center of the illustration (when Adam expressed a desire for more of a feeding frenzy) and removed from the edges (when Adam pointed out that the corners would be covered by contractually required logos).

Full size cover sketch number two. Adam and Dan wanted to emphasize the isolation of any human encountering ghouls in their lair so it was suggested that there be only one (living) person in the illustration. The other humans being attacked either became corpses or were removed.

Once a specific design had been chosen I roughed out a full sized sketch on 14″x17″ bristol board. The sketch was then scanned and sent to Adam and Dan for approval and suggestions.

These are the 3rd and 4th of the second batch of thumbnail sketches for the Ghoul sourcebook cover. After a brief discussion we decided that thumbnail #1, posted yesterday, was the idea that should be developed further.

None of the first four thumbnails seemed to feature a good cover image so it was back to the sketchbook for four more attempts. These are the first two.

These thumbnails and yesterday’s were the first I did. Adam and Dan commented on them and I came up with a second set. The first two of those will get posted tomorrow.

Coming up with a front cover illustration was more challenging than coming up with the back cover illustration. Not surprising. Most people would never take a look at the back cover if they hadn’t found the front cover intriguing. A front cover has to catch a buyer’s eye. It can’t be too busy or the mind will take too long to register it. It can’t be too simple or the mind won’t be interested.

I started the process by doing a series of thumbnails that I ran past Dan, the author, and Adam, our editor/publisher. This is the first one. I’ll be showing the others over the next few days.