Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Army of Darkness covers

So far, I've done 4. I started with #18. I just posted #21 last week, so here are #18-20!





3 comments:

Kelly said...

God, I love the colors in these. So vibrant. Which makes me wonder, do you have a preference? A wide range of color or a limited palette? I understand that it's limited to what the editor's expect for their books, but I was wondering if you have a personal preference when it comes to color.

Scott Cohn said...

hi kelly!

how're things?

i haven't had any limitations on palette's for any cover (so far). however, for this one, i was going through a lot of jack the ripper ref, and it seemed natural to go with essentially a b&w or monochromatic cover to match the era, even though ash doesn't go back in time.
adding the red sky and blood with no highlights or shading seemed like a no brainer to make them pop off the rest of the piece. i was very inspired by the last season of the batman animated series, where the skyline was always red.

for the first cover with the mayan temple, i was asked to do a version of the movie poster, so some colors had to match. although, all i really did on that was match the red highlight. the rest was up to me basically.

the 2nd cover was based off the painting "american gothic", so there, the colors were pretty much laid out for me already. i thought about going in a darker direction, but i wanted to be more subtle about it, so i put the old man from the painting in the window, and gave the girl the same pattern on her shirt as the woman in the painting.

one thing i've learned from mike (manley) and others is, once you're happy with a piece, try to push it even more. in ps, you can always go back!

on the gillette piece below, i was given orange and grey to work with, and that was it. made things a little harder, but not by much.

as for personal preference, i try to just go with what works. i do have favorite colors like blues and reds, but i find i surprise myself with some of the colors i end up with that i never thought i'd use.

Kelly said...

Interesting. I was just curious. Not that I'd ever thought I'd picked up on a preference, I was just curious as to how that sort of thing might play out for an artist working in a situation where there is almost always a client involved. It's nice to know that you're given so much freedom to make choices of your own while working within a client's framework, but I guess that's just one of the perks of working hard and getting good at what you do.