Legend of Draconite Cover Art: Gift Search

This is the second installment of the Legend of Draconite cover art series.

Gift Search

Ah, my plot-hole baby. There's something exciting about the second book of a series. There's more expositions to look forward to, more of the world to explore, and more adventures to discover.

Let's jump into it. The first edition of Gift Search features the Gift machines Theras (top) and Dragonhart (middle), which play a major part in the story. The designs on these machines have changed in my art over time, although Theras doesn't look much different. Unfortunately Theras ended up looking like some sort of mutated, robotic caterpillar on this cover. The "theme," which I explained in the first installment of this series, is actually of Gage, the central Molouk figure in the story. The silvery flames around the cover were a bad design choice on my part, as you can barely see the book title on the bottom. Oh the blunders of self-doing-everything-myself-publishing.

For the COL edition, I featured the Draconite warrior Demos. Something that was fun about the COL editions was detailing the Draconites' armor. I actually sketched out the COL edition characters, scanned them in, and did all the coloring over the pencil. The background is a photograph of mountains I took from my high school bleachers one stormy morning, and represent the mountains around the city of Mal'ur in the story.

Demos carried over into the Amazon edition of Gift Search. For the background I was trying to replicate Polynesian art. The characters once more spend a majority of the story on the island of Zanoll, which has some Polynesian influence when it comes to art. The coloring was kept minimal, highlighting Demos's Gift machine, Phobos, and the two extra arms he provides to Demos. As a mom I sometimes wish I had four arms...

Fun fact: for the inked characters on the Amazon covers, I referred to the COL edition cover artwork to make the armor accurate and as consistent as possible on the Draconite characters, with the exception of E'lsra, which you'll learn more about in the next installment.

The last picture is actually the back cover art for the first edition of Gift Search. The first editions of the series had sepia back covers; Sunstone didn't have any art as I recall. I don't have any images for the back covers of the COL editions, and I struggle to remember how I designed them; I think I may have just flipped the red border along the spine onto the back. The Amazon editions don't have artwork on the back, just the summary.

Thanks for joining me on this cover art installment, and keep an eye out for the cover art of E'lsra, along with the reveal of the new cover art for the Amazon edition!