Definat 35

Defiant 35 was probably my least favourite cover I've done for pendant. But this time everything, including the script was better. I was even thinking of giving up doing covers from them because I just wasn't inspired anymore. It's hard to make Star Trek exciting and not make it look like a bunch of stuck up sci-fi geeks standing around in spandex, they don't have the muscles to make them look cool like super heroes so they just look like regular people in extra ordinary outfits. This last episode had the crew disguised as the Breen, which despite having a helmet directly swiped from Boush from Star Wars is pretty damn cool. I was looking at this book of fleer star wars trading cards I had lost as a kid and recently was given as a gift - anyway its got lots of pieces by lots of famous artists I now know, but didn't at the time and this one particularly caught my eye. I quickly saw it was Mignolla and was just blown away at how powerful his stuff always is despite being simple and he uses so many techniques that are his trademark.

Anyway, So I scanned it and swiped the colors and was really hooked on the yellows I think I was channeling Dune or something, but eventually I just wasn't sold on the whole "yellow snow"-thing, call me weird, or just a boy. So i eventually but a blue layer over the top and set the layer to hue. I had tried messing with the colors and adding more blue and sucking out the red to make it feel colder but it still didn't sell the idea of "cold" like blues and purples.


Another fun thing was that I knew I would need texture for the snow but it would also need to be coloured white so instead of drawing it out and then having to color the snow white in photoshop I just drew some scratchy textural things seperate in black, inverted them in photoshop and added them as a layer above the line art after i set the layer type to cut out all the black - the same process I used for the Kryton logo and any white on black text I do in comics. So anyway, it worked, it was fun, and it looks frign' sweet.

I did fight with the size of the Defiant cover, as I usually do. With the text on top (unlike comic books) and the title centered at the bottom) and the whole cover being closer to magazine format than comic book, by the time you get done you really are working with a safe area that is more of a horizontal rectangle than a verticle one, so i swiped and clone tooled my way out of it but as always it catches me off guard as I am used to working in comic book format. The composition was inspired by a splash page Tim Sale did of Batman in a riot outfit, in The Long Halloween.

Star Trek: Defiant, Ep. 36 by ~xaqBazit on deviantART