Ghost Machine Covers

Extended views and step-by-step

Sep 15, 2024

Hello from Castrum Lusitania, my fortress in northern Portugal. Welcome to another edition of our weekly newsletter.

A couple of months ago I worked on a bunch of covers on a short span of time. As they’re released, it makes for an excellent opportunity to do some extend looks and the usual step-by-steps.

This week let’s dive into the two covers I did for Ghost Machine - one for Geiger and the other for Redcoat. Two fantastic but very different books, therefore in need of two different approaches.

But first!…

…A reminder that Phenomena Book 3 preorders are now live! Check last week’s newsletter for more info and a full view of the cover, a glorious wraparound.

Geiger

I was offered the chance of working in these two covers by Brian Cunningham, Ghost Machine’s Editor-In-Chief. Brian and I worked briefly together at DC so it was very nice to get back together.

It’s always exciting to do a cover for a brand new book, so I went to town and read every comic available for both Geiger and Redcoat to prepare myself. I always do that if possible before doing any work, as it allows you to immerse your head with imagery and possibilities, which is immensely helpful as you start thinking about ideas.

Unsurprisingly, given the creative teams, both books were stellar.

I tackled Geiger first, where the brief was to get some sort of overview of a city and add the main character and his two-headed wolf-dog. Using an image of LA as reference, I came up with this:

Enthusiastically approved, I went for the pencils. The only change I did was drawing one of the wolf-dog heads howling to add some flavor to it and make the main character’s face slightly more visible.

Inking it was a simple case of drawing hundreds of windows and bricks while trying not to go mad. You know, the usual:

After which I added the digital grey tones (darker tones for the foreground and lighter for the background):

And my buddy Chris O’Halloran joined me for his usual stellar coloring work. Brian and I briefly discussed the possibility of it being night time, but then discarded the notion because of this being a post-apocalyptical adventure and therefore there wouldn’t be any night lights. Duh. Golden hour it was:

Redcoat

For Redcoat, I wanted a very different approach. This is a book with a lot more humor, where the main character is an immortal redcoat from the 18th century that dresses the same despite centuries of evolution. With the anachronistic aspect of it all being a recurrent gag, I wanted to showcase that prominently on the cover.

Hence I came up with a giant sci-fi gun - I call it a Liefeld gun - on a guy wearing 250 year old clothes. The skulls behind him represent all the people he has killed - trust me, he kills a lot of people.

This was a case where the main figure would make or brake the cover and I wasn’t happy with that part of the sketch, so I basically started from scratch to adjust the pose and give it a bit more of flow and pizazz (had to check the spelling on this one).

Once I was happy, the usual steps followed, with colors by Chris O’Halloran once again.

On Other News

I’ve been doing nothing but inking this week for the new book. I already have two character sheets, 8 penciled pages, 4 of them fully inked and 4 more in different stages of progress. Very exciting.