Sherwood Smith contacted me for a cover painting for Time of Daughters, a fantasy novel that turned into two novels by the time she was finished writing. She had a fairly strong image of what she wanted: looking up at two characters on top of a castle, one with a dagger and one with a bow. I decided to set the scene at dawn, to take full advantage of the potential colors.
Shoutout to SenshiStock, who provided the reference! She was doing a Kickstarter for photo reference where backers could get two poses of their choice with two models, so I nabbed that and had them pose for me.
If you’re interested in the process of creating this painting, I did a walkthrough in two parts on my blog showing how I gathered reference, created a photomanipulation, then painted a greyscale version before layering colors on and creating the final color cover painting:
Time of Daughters: Making a Digital Fantasy Book Cover Illustration Part 1
Time of Daughters: Making a Digital Fantasy Book Cover Illustration, Part 2