• The Antler Boy Cover Process

The Antler Boy Cover Process

The Antler Boy passed $45K yesterday! According to the Kickstarter stats a lot of these backers are coming from outside sources, meaning the word of mouth factor is playing a big roll. I announced Tuesday morning that if Antler Boy can get to $60K I’ll draw a new story and add it to the book. So tell a friend about it and get them to back it too. Today though I thought I’d share a little of the making of this book. Last summer during a run one night it hit me that time is short and I shouldn’t put off making this collection happen. However, a big creative roadblock for me was figuring out under what story or title would I hang all the stories on. Before I arrived at the Antler Boy I was entertaining the idea of calling the whole book The Secret of the Spacecave. I really liked the sound of that and so I went with it. Here’s some initial sketches and rough ideas.

I liked this stuff, but really wasn’t feeling it. I knew it needed something different. So I toyed with calling it The Robot and the Sparrow and Other Stories…but that’s too wordy. A friend suggested just calling it Star Thrower, but I felt it wasn’t inviting enough. What about just calling it exactly what it is: Side Project. But that didn’t feel specific enough.

Then one day in a meeting I scribbled this:

That was it. I loved the idea of all the characters hanging out in the boy’s antlers. And I decided to call it The Antler Boy and Other Stories. The following is how it went from a scribble in a notebook, to the final cover image. After the first sketch I’ll do a larger rough and nail down the figures and poses. This was done digitally:

Then I printed out my rough and using a light box drew a nice rendered version of the cover on vellum.

Originally I was planning on putting my CC & Benson story in the book, but I decided I had other plans for those guys and replaced them with Missile Mouse. Just a little redraw, no problem. Once it’s scanned in I did a digital linework pass, just to make things a little crisper.