Judging the book by its cover

Hi again. Over the past few weeks, I have been working on the illustrations of No Dice, a new roleplaying game I have been involved with. Since I have been working flat out on the Illustrations, I thought I would show you what I have done so far....

















This is the Logo design which hopefully captures the essence of the game- essentially, No Dice is about freedom, and uses playing cards rather than the more traditional dice-based games. So I went for the ball and chain metaphor.
Throughout the book, a character called Puck acts as narrator and guide. He is a kind of Jester-type figure, and from the get go, the writer, Leo, had a pretty strong impression of his character and appearance. I began working on 3 different versions of Puck, the first of which , known affectionately as Mini-Puck, is a very cartoon like, stylised figure who appears in various guises and costume throughout the book, in exaggerated and comical poses.

This was my first finished illustration of Mini-Puck, more for my own reference really, so i could easily refer back to this, for proportions and colours. It probably wont actually appear in the final book.

















From that, here`s the first of the Mini-Puck illustrations from the book, each depicting a particular genre. Although coloured, the original book illustrations will be in black and white.


















And from here we move on to a much less stylised, more sophisticated Puck. Since the illustrations in this style will involve more complex storytelling, the character needs to be much less cartoony.


















And finally for the cover illustration. I like to refer to this more realistic version as Uber-Puck. Since people will judge a book by it`s cover, it had to be a little bit special. The biggest difficulty turned out to be the hair, which I really had to learn how it worked.


So anyway, that's how things are progressing, art-wise, at the moment. I will post more to you in the near future....