"There are no accidents"

I have started doing the wraparound cover to Chuffin' Billy book two. I had the image of Billy piloting a canal boat and knocked out a quick sketch. That was a few weeks ago and in that time I lost the will to live and to draw, depression is a funny old thing appearing when it's least needed. Drawing wise, starting from scratch I decided to go back to basics and try to reignite my passion for mark making. Which meant looking at work that inspires me, that's where I found my self drawing freehand with a Pental Colour Brush Pen again.

For the textured sky I scanned in brush marks, scanner set at Black & White at 1200dpi which makes the smallest brush mark an epic graphic element. As I was layering them, I thought the black smoke was dramatic and fit the theme of the story location.

This is only the background and there will be a foreground figure in the final image. It took awhile to get to the version I prefer. I spent a long time on the 'purple' version. Thinking it was what I wanted unaware at how 'grubby' it was looking, and it's only the background! It was a 'slip up' that caused me to drag a layer that ended up with the sky blue and as soon as I saw it, I knew it was right. A friend on Instagram said "there are no accidents" (wisdom by courtesy of Master Oogway).

I drew with a brush pen and digitally coloured the foreground elements separately and dropped them over the background. I had been playing around with making abstract wallpapers recently and a design seemed to fit really well with the colour scheme so decided to use that as canal water representation. Again something unconnected, that really wasn't meant to be happened and... worked! The logo and episode title are just temporary, there are lots of other 'wordings' front and back  to go on but at his stage I do not know what they are.