Super Dinosaur 13 cover unveiled

Hello Skybound fans!

Every week, we’re going to unveil a new SKYBOUND cover, along with notes from the artist about their process.

This week, I am lucky enough to share SUPER DINOSAUR artist Jason Howard’s detailed process in creating the cover for September’s issue 13. Super Dinosaur is one of my favorite books coming out, and I hope this behind-the-scenes treat will pump you up for issue 11, in-stores June 6^th!

The cover to issue 13 started off with a discussion between Robert and myself regarding the events of that issue. The covers for the Escape from Inner-Earth arc all follow a similar design: with the vertical bar focusing on one character, and the rest of the cover following another part of the story. After talking to Robert, I worked up this sketch. Derek is held captive and the others are on mission to find him! It was drawn digitally using a Wacom Cintiq and SketchBook Pro software. I dropped in the logo and some color at this stage to begin visualizing how the elements would work together.

The sketch was approved, with one minor request: to make the art a little smaller to obscure the logo less. With that in mind, I drew a tighter image (still working digitally at this stage).

I printed this tighter drawing out in light blue color onto bristol board. Some details were tightened up, mainly the girls running. Some details were changed, mainly the position of Battle Shock’s right arm. I inked the cover using Kuretake pens, Pentel brush pen and Staedtler pens.

The inks were then scanned back into the computer, and I used Photoshop to color. I had been planning to draw a bunch of trees and clouds in the background at the pencil stage, but because I knew I would be coloring it myself I left that area blank and added it in color only. I like this look sometimes, I think it adds nice detail but because its only color allows it to recede into the background and not take any attention from the much cooler stuff going on in front!