And all the major flat color has been laid down. Next will be shadow and color detailing.

The next step is to create a layer of flat color. Ghouls are, apparently, usually greenish or grayish. They have a lot of variation in color though so I don’t use the same color on more than two figures.

Once the illustration is scanned into Photoshop (and probably cleaned up) I copy it to two more layers and set those layers to “multiply”. That results in this greater saturation of color.

Most of the tutorials I read on painting and coloring recommend against using solid black in a painting’s shadows. Almost every time I’ve done that I’ve ended up going back and adding black into the composition. I like black. It’s one of my favorite colors. I recognize that true black rarely occurs in life. Still, I find that black helps to anchor an illustration for me.

I’m not sure if that makes sense. Anyway, here are the colored pencils with black ink shadows. The rest of the work will be done in Photoshop.

The next step is to go over everything with colored pencils.

The finished pencil drawing. Color comes next.

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.