CD-Cover... Getting There :D

The next challenge after having painted all of the pages was of course to add the backgrounds.  To get the backgrounds in I had to rub out all of the white on paintings in Photoshop.  This took horrifically long and was very torturous :D but I can't stand it when people cheat on this and it ends up looking crap so I just took my time.

As I had done in my earlier Herne experiment I painted the background in two layers: acrylic and ecoline.   I stuck mainly to green based backgrounds to keep the foresty feel but I did make them different greens because I felt that went better with the different tree concepts.

It took a while fiddling with the colours but I'm happy with them like this.  After having done this I painted the trees for the transparant pages, I kept them reletively simple and managed to get them all done in a day which, considering my usual speed, was great.

 

Lots of green trees here for Robin to hide behind. The right-hand half will be on transparant paper overlaying the Robin page and the left-hand page will be on normal paper. I was going to add the credits thoughout the other pages but when I tried that the pages became so chaotic I felt it was better to do it like this.

 

Here's Herne's oak tree. I kept it over to the left so that you can easily see Herne but that Albion will only be revealed after having turned the page.

 

This is the front half of the circle of trees...

 

...and this is the back half of the circle of trees.  As you can see (and as I've mentioned earlier) this section is on two pages.  It is in the centre of the book so there had to be a double page due to binding order.   Also by overlaying the two pages there will being more depths to the circle of trees and make it more comprehendable.

I decided to go for leaning trees for the battles page because they always remind of the way two armies storm towards each other.  And also obviously a stump as a symbol of destruction.

I quickly put the two pages over the top of each other in photoshop to get the general idea before printing.  Obvioudly they will look a bit different.

 

This is the start of the CD Design.  It will have text on it as well like the text above.  I tried at first by taking details out of the above pages by I decided I didn't want anything too complex as there's already a lot of imagery.  

 

 I'm really happy so far with this project.  Although it seems like it's taken a long time, if I did it all in one go I could have probably made it in 1,5 to 2 weeks so that's not so bad considering the amount of work that goes into the painting.