Book Cover Art - Golden Emblem

Book illustration and cover art projects are such an enjoyable challenge, because the author often has a clear vision of how they want it to look, and I get the opportunity to extract the ideas from their mind's eye and bring it to life in image form. Asking lots of questions, applying any reference pictures, and drawing thumbnails on the spot during the brainstorming meeting helps pinpoint the image the author is picturing. This first image shows the the author's rough sketch with my notes on the right. On the left is the thumbnail that made a solid connection with the author's vision for the cover art.

Next, I used Adobe Illustrator to create the outline for the cover art and applied a requested modification to the tail. Below is the final approved outline.

All color was added to the eagle in Adobe Photoshop, where the paintbrush and smudge tools were utilized extensively. The eagle needed to appear to be a metallic gold emblem, so to help guide my digital painting I looked up reference pictures showing how light reflects off of golden sculptures and coins of various shapes . The finished book cover art is pictured below.