Thursday, May 13, 2010

Book Cover

A cover I did for a German publishing company.  The book is a compilation of two previously published books by A. Lee Martinez.

24 comments:

  1. Anonymous3:04 PM

    WOW! This is great! I really like the troll in the back!

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  2. This is some serious awesomeness

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  3. You are one talented son of a gun Sam! This is sweet!

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  4. Very cool cover man!!! The lighting is amazing!!!!

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  5. this is incredibly wicked.

    Your sense of form and lighting is unreal. What an imagination

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  6. Awesome rendering technique! Do u use textures on top of the painting or does your brushes have texture themselves. Cause I can feel a subtle grain like effect. I may be wrong :).

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  7. This looks awesome.....Loved the texture and lighting.

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  8. You keep being the best master.
    .I like the light as always in your works Sam.
    .My favourite character is that teenwolf.

    thanks for your critic on my work , I appreciate it

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  9. Awesome!!! I love this so much. So smooth and great color!

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  10. Anonymous5:02 AM

    woah! cool book cover! love the guys gloomy face ^^

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  11. Hello Sam! I have been following your blog for a while. You are an extraordinary painter and colorist!

    I have a little doubt and I wonder if you would be able to solve it.

    I have been trying Ryan Wood's method for coloring (I believe you are too a follower of this artist) So, I start with the B/W value and then I add the color in a separate layer in "Color" or "Hard light" mode.

    Although I tried it, it doesn't quite give the result I was hoping for. The color looks kinda poor.

    http://cghub.com/forum/showthread.php?t=2969

    In this link you can see the color and the B/W version. (it's the CGHUB forum)

    Could you please, give me a hint about this technique?

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  12. Hi Sam, I really love the art! The colors are great!

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  13. Thank you everyone!

    Nicolay: Mostly textures on top of the painting, but there's a lot of detail hand-painted in also. There's also a subtle grain effect applied after I finished, so you're right.

    Spiritto: I think the grayscale-->colorize technique works best when you limit the use of atmosphere until you've already applied the colors. Part of why Ryan Wood is so good at that technique is because he is careful about his exchanges of warm and cool color when moving across forms and in the detail. If you don't do this, your colors look dead. The problem with heavy atmosphere is it complicates the colorizing process, because atmosphere modifies the warm/cool relationships, so you need to be a master to make the exchanges of color in the details work with the color changes applied with the atmosphere. So I'd recommend painting with as little atmosphere as possible in the black and white phase, then applying atmosphere in color after the colors have already been applied to the rest of the image. Does that make sense?

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  14. More than stupendous Sam!!! Love what you do

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  15. love the colors - and that club brings back happy memories of pj gladiator :)

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  16. Fantastic colours Sam! You're the lighting master!

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  17. What I don't understand is why everybody is getting so excited about working from B/W and adding color later on, when nobody (that incl Ryan Wood) uses is correctly. Just check one thing in your artwork. Turn your colored version into B/W. Then compare it to the original grey version. They're not the same. So, if you're using this process to get the best endresult as far as value goes, you're wrong. Because the value changes after you add color...I'm sorry;)

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  18. Very cool. I really like the lighting.

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  19. It does make sense, in fact. I have researched and also done a little trial error myself. I have found out that what you are saying is true.

    THank you very much Sam. :)

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  20. fantastic work of art! did you go to any art lesson or it's just a one natural talent!!

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  21. haha! love the expressions

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  22. That is completely and totally fantastic!

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