If you live in the Minneapolis area be sure to go out and pick up a copy of this week’s Vita.MN Magazine. I was lucky enough to do the cover for the annual winter guide issue. This makes it two years straight of doing the cover for this issue. I love working on Vita.MN. They are a great local magazine. Below is a step by step process from concept to creation of the recent cover.

1. This cover kind of had a quick turn around do to a holiday vacation on my part. I was told that the main focus of the article was going to be about extreme ice climbing. We wanted to use a crazy Spider-Man like angle on the main character. I did these two thumbnails and it was pretty obvious the one on the right seemed to work great for the text and logo on the cover so we ran with it.

2. After getting some great reference from my art director Leslie on ice climbers I started penciling. I wanted to do a fun sporty chic for some reason so we just went with that. I found some climbing reference of a younger woman sporting pigtails that I liked so it was added in. It helps cause most woman tie their hair up when climbing so this give her personality and also eliminates me from having to draw flowing hair to show it’s a girl and not represent the situation properly.

3. Final art went some what smooth. The only thing we needed to do was add a little more room at the bottom to show her foot. Color palette was decided early on. The only real trouble I had was with the ice. I had kept the same dark blue overlay color that is on the main character for the longest time on everything. It finally hit me to change the tone of the ice to make it seem A) Colder and B) Push the bottom of the ice farther down and give the environment some depth. I blame missing the obvious solution on all the holiday activity;)

I think the end cover turned out well. First time I’ve only had to draw one person for a Vita.Mn cover. Looking forward to doing more with them in the future. Now go out and start climbing some ice!
Brent