SubRosa Detectives - The Curse Of The Japanese House

This is the third book about these detective kids. Each of the books evolves around a mystery that is somehow tied up with an historic person, time or item. In this third book we meet a man that brought japanese culture to Europe, and we learn about Art Noveau and about strange things that happens in the Japanese House that seems to have been cursed by a japanese spirit called a Kitsune. 

When I start with a book cover I make the tiniest little thumbnail possible, just to get ideas down on paper.

In this case we already have a style and a background for the cover since this is the third book in a series. Here I try out size and gestures of the characters.

Then I draw all the characters separately. I don't always do this, but it's an old animation habit to put everything on separate layers.

I print the lineart on watercolour paper, as thick as I can manage to get into my printer. I want to use the clean up lines I did earlier, so for this I print faint lines and then paint watercolour without bothering about the linework so much.

So each character separately. I always think I will continue with these watercolours when I have scanned the watercolour texture, would make nice little original pieces even if they turn out different from the finished painting.

I put the lines back on top of the watercolour (the layer with the lineart is on multiply, and then some colour so they are not completely black) and paint a lot extra and make more shadows and stuff. This is photoshop of course. Then I start arranging them together, making sure they make a nice composition.

For fun I often take photos with Instagram, just to get new ideas of filters and lighting.

The background is already finished, I made that for the first book. I just add some details that's inspired by this new book.

Detail of background. This is not from this book, this is a Tibetan Dorje that I hope we will be able to use for some story later on. It's one of the items I just put in the shelf on the background when we started this project and needed it to look like we already had lots of stuff happening. But I really like the linework of this one, it turned out very nice.

This is the whole cover, bookshelf on front and back and the characters on top of the front. After this I send away the painting and André, who is the brilliant layout artist, puts all kinds of text and logos on the cover.

And the finished book, fresh from the printers!