(Nick Cage free) Ghost Rider sketch cover

A couple of notes about this one. I went into this drawing wanting to try a few new things out. I taped off and confined the image to a specific area because I hated drawing to the edges on previous books where the pencil continually skipped off the cover. After getting halfway through and looking at the piece, I wasn't sure if this image was going to be clear as to what was going on in certain areas if left to just a gray-scale drawing.

Between flames and smoke obscuring and overlapping the skull and it being in black and white, some areas were hard to tell if it was supposed to be skull, flames, or smoke. Maybe if I had zoomed out a little so the entire flaming head was shown and you could see the outline of the flames and smoke it would have been a little clearer? IDK.

I decided since I had taped off a border anyways that maybe this was the piece to test how watercolors fared on these covers. As it turns out, watercolors are the shits for these books. The covers have some kind of slick coating or treatment that makes the paint bead up and it was a heck of a battle to get a few washes to actually lay where I wanted them. So for future reference, if I want to work in color its going to have to be acrylics, markers, or colored pencils.

SOLD

I think adding the light washes of color helped the image, but here's a scan of the drawing before paint was laid down to compare.

I don't know, now that I'm looking at both scans, there are things I like about each version.