Children of the Night

The goal of this entirely original project is to illustrate a cover for a comic book. The comic, titled “Children of the Night” is about the misadventures of three monstrous co-eds and their demonic dorm mother. I wanted to make each of the characters distinct from one another, so I decided to make them all different types of monsters (an alien, a phantom, a homunculus, and a demon) and render them all by hand using markers. The dilapidated house they reside in was rendered using marker as well. I also knew that this project would heavily use Photoshop, so I downloaded several free images from www.pixabay.com/ that I would use the textures of to bring more life to the image.

With all of the assets drawn/gathered, I placed them into a 10 by 16 Photoshop document and arranged them together to create the cover, which pays homage to the poster for Tim Burton’s “Beetlejuice”. I also looked at several covers of vintage horror comics for reference. Inspired by their aesthetic, I added a logo, subhead, price, and barcode (which was downloaded from www.pixabay.com/) to bring this comic book-inspired work together.

A last minute change to the project came down to the name of the comic itself. Originally, it was titled “American Gothic”, but a classmate advised me that it might confused with the famous painting by Grant Wood. This resulted in the name of the comic being changed to the “Dracula”-influenced title: “Children of the Night”.