Rolling Blackouts has a cover! Here’s how it came to be:
Step 1: Sketches for possible covers which I sent to Tom Devlin, my editor at Drawn & Quarterly. He liked the bottom right one best, which shows my journalists interviewing Iraqi Kurd Sam Malkandi on his rooftop in Sulaymaniyah.
Step 2: A bigger version of that sketch with some tones to show how the shadows will fall.
Step 3: I decided that using one point perspective made the image look too static, so I rotated the scene and put my characters in the other corner of the roof.
Step 4: Added some color to see how that will look…
Step 5: By now I was drawing the final artwork on watercolor paper and beginning to color it, but I went back to the color sketch to add more visual elements before I put them down on the final work, just to make sure they looked all right.
Step 6: And here’s the finished cover! With title lettering done by Tom, because I am really quite terrible at lettering.
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