Design a Fantasy Book Cover in Procreate

1. Introduction to Fantasy Book Covers: If you're new to creating book covers, specifically fantasy book covers, and you're not sure how to begin, then this is the class for you. Hi. My name is Donnie Weigel, and I'm a freelance Illustrator and book cover designer based in Indiana. I've been designing book covers since 1999, but it wasn't until 2020 that I discovered the power of P create and how this little app has completely changed the way I design. In this class, I'll take you on a fantasy book journey. We'll talk about why fantasy novels are so popular right now. Then I will show you why designing fantasy covers are so much fun to create. We'll go over certain design nuances in the fantasy genre. To balance your layout and create a focal point on your cover, using fonts and color to evoke powerful emotion. And finally, we'll move into creating the book cover together using a procreate brush set. After we've created the layout, I will show you how to apply finishing touches to your design to really make it pop out. Whether you're an author seeking to learn how to design your own cover or a graphic designer who's looking to expand your skills in the book cover design niche. This class is a great start into the diverse world of fantasy covers. After completing this project, I invite and challenge you to design and post your own fantasy cover, using the brush set and techniques we discussed in this class. So grab your iPad and pencil, and let's get started. 2. What is a Fantasy Book?: What exactly is a fantasy book? This is a book of fiction, featuring magical elements, other worldly creatures, or supernatural occurrences. Here are a few common characteristics of fantasy books. Magic, imaginary worlds, mythical creatures, heroic journeys, moral themes. Some famous fantasy titles and authors include Lord of the Rings, Game of Brons, Harry Potter, anything by Sarah Moss, anything by Sarah Parker, Shadow and Bone, which is also a great Netflix series, by the way, and the Witcher, another great series. Why are fantasy books so popular? Fantasy provides a temporary escape from reality and immerses the reader in imaginary worlds with endless possibilities. Fantasy has several subgenres that include epic or high fantasy, featuring sweeping landscapes, castles, or battles, often with detailed artwork showcasing heroes, mythical creatures, and magical elements. Dark fantasy covers convey an ominous mood with dark tones, eerie environments, sinister figures, or supernatural elements that evoke mystery and danger. Urban fantasy focuses on city scapes, combined with magic or mythological creatures, lending contemporary with supernatural. Superhero books would also fall under this genre. Sword and sorcery covers are more action oriented with warriors, mags, and intense combat scenes, weapons, armor, and witchcraft. Mythological and folklore covers have symbolic elements, ancient designs, and cultural or folklore references, along with traditional and detailed artwork. Romanticy is short for romantic fantasy, which stand out with softer colors, enchanting imagery or magical creatures that evoke a lighter mood with a fairytale atmosphere. Now let's find some fantasy inspiration for our book cover. 3. Cover Inspiration: Let's look at a few examples of some other fantasy books for inspiration. Here are several books I've picked out that I feel are beautifully designed, and they all share a common theme that we're going to learn for our project. What do these share in common? Notice how the designs on these covers are all centered with symmetrical elements surrounding the title. This is a design structure that works great and is relatively easy to learn and apply to a book cover. Here are the features we'll focus on. Centrally aligned, symmetrical elements, dark background, main focus image a globe beneath the focus image and in the elements, a bold, flourished or sera font. 4. Fantasy Cover Design 101: Here are the steps to creating a book cover. First, sketch out a rough concept to get an idea layout. An option is to place a background image or pattern in at a low opacity to set the tone. Apply a flourished order or corner elements that draw the eye to the center. Set the title in the center in a bold, flourished or saf font. The main image is centered above or below the title. Center the author name at top or the bottom in the same font as the title and smaller. Apply scrolls or simple embellishments to visually anchor everything in place. Adding a globe beneath the main image along with highlight grabs attention. Weave story line elements into the design for reader interest. The finishing touches complete the design as a whole. Now, join me and let's design a fantasy cover together. 5. Follow-Along Tutorial: From the gallery, let's click on the plus sign to create a new project. Here, I will select new Canvas, and we're doing an e book. The standard size for this is 1,600 of 25 60 pixels. I will keep the DPI set at 300. Now I want to change the background color to black to create a total black, I'll double tap in the black area. Now our Canvas is set to design. Let's put a title on our cover. I'll head over to the Wrench tab and select Add, then add text. Let's call this the mystic Forest. I'll move this to about where I wanted to sit on the Canvas, but I want to center it, let's turn on the guides. I'll select the wrench tab again and then Canvas and turn on drawing guide, then edit drawing guide. I'll lighten the grid color on the color bar, and I want to enlarge the grid size just a bit more. Now, I have a guide that helps me position my elements. Let's change that font to something more fantasy style. To select the entire text, I'll triple click. Here, I'll scroll through the fonts. I'm looking for our free font called Osberg. I want the word the to be smaller. I'll double click on that to change the size. I love how Procreate has so many text styling options. It's really nice. Now, we can have a better idea of how the title looks on the cover. I'll enlarge this and center it with the grid. Let's add the author name in the same font. I could just duplicate the title for this, but I think it will be easier to create a new text. We'll head on over to the wrench again. I'll set this in place and type in my go to fake author name, which is Lela Quinn. I'll reduce this down so there's room to add some elements around the name. Now that we have the text in place, let's work on adding a focal point to the cover. Here's where things get interesting. We're going to create a new layer and then tap on the paint brush tab. Then we'll select our fantasy light brush set. This includes 25 different brushes and stamps taken from a larger fantasy brush set that has all the brushes we'll need for this cover. Les some extras. For the focus, let's choose this symmetry tree and Let's change the color to a tan using our color palette. I will resize this and use the grid to center the tree in. Okay. We'll leave this for a minute. I like fantasy colors that give little hints to what the books about. For this cover, our story could revolve around a magical tree and also involve dragons. Let's select this dragon for the top graphic. This visually aligns to the tree and helps provide a visual path for the reader. Also, note how the spacing between each element is balanced. Now let's add some decoration. I want to add some corners to this cover. Let's create a new layer and I will choose the corner flourish in our verse set. Rather than adding four corners one at a time, I'm going to show you a cool little trick. Let's go back into our guide settings, and I'm going to change this over to symmetry and select options. I want to have this set on vertical. Let's make this guide white, and it might be hard to see, but now we have a thin white line running down the center of the cover. Now when I add the border to one side, it mirrors a border on the other side. This saves time from having to align each border. Let's make these a little larger. We'll take this layer and duplicate it, which also duplicates the mirroring. I'll select the arrow tab or it's actually called the transform tab, and in the panel, I'll choose flip vertical. Then I'll slide down to the bottom and position it like the top. Here's another protip. For an element, tap outside the selection in the direction you wanted to move, and it just moves it, very slightly. Now we'll do the same tap dance for the author name to move it up just a bit. Now I will add the side flourishes to balance out the border. We'll turn that at an angle and I'll position it so it's balanced in with the other elements. Now, I'll duplicate this and do a horizontal flip for the other side. Now you'll notice that the cover is starting to take on a more fantasy feel. Let's go ahead and add in some symbolic elements. We're going to add a new layer and add some swords into the design. I want to position these at each corner at a 45 degree angle, and I'll go ahead and zoom in so I can see what I'm doing. The symmetry grid doesn't quite work well with this technique. I'll have to manually position them. But I will just set up the top swords and duplicate for the bottom like we did for the borders. I want to align these in the same place on the grid. To make things easy, I'll just merge those two layers and duplicate. Flip them upside down and set them in place. I'm sure there's a better way, but for now, I'll just i all these as close as I can. Let's go ahead and work on some finishing touches to bring this design to light. We'll start by adding leaves to the tree. I'll create a new layer, then locate the leaf stamp in our brush set. S. I'll set these in a light teal color for now. I like this size, so let's go with it. I created this particular stamp to scatter and change its size every time, so it gives the tree a more organic look and feel. I want to see how this looks if I do just one side and mirror it on the other. Try it. We'll go ahead and duplicate this and flip it horizontally. I don't know. That looks weird to me. What do you think? I think it would look more natural to just cover the tree organically. We'll delete that layer and continue on with our leaf stamping. It has to be just right, you know. We'll make a few of them falling down just to look natural. Now, let's apply a magical glow behind a tree. To do this, I'll create a layer near the bottom and do a light greenish teal tone. I'll select the ellipse tool and I'm just going to draw a circle, then I'll drag the color right on top to fell it. We'll center that circle with the tree. I want to give this a soft glow look, so I'm going to blur it. I'll tap on the adjustment tool and select Gasium blur. At the top of the cover, you'll see a gasium blur bar. With my pencil, I'm just clicking and dragging across the screen, and you'll see as I do this, the bar increases in percentage as the circle blurs more. That looks good. I like how it softly illuminates the tree, but now it looks like the tree is hard to see, so we'll have to fix that. Let's go back to the tree layer. I'm going to put an alpha lock on this so that anything I do to this layer is contained only in the image and not the background. I want to give the tree some texture. I'm going to choose the green brush and then choose a darker brown color. Now, I'll just color in the tree with this texture brush. Notice how it's only staying inside the image. I love Alpha lac. I use it all the time. This helped pop out the tree from the glow. Okay. So now let's work on that dragon. For this, I want to apply a glitter look to it, so I'll see how this glitter brush looks. Oops. That's what happens when you forget to turn on Alpha Lock. Let's try this again. Not sure I like this. Let's try another glitter bruh. I don't know. That looks too glittery to me. I'm going back to the first brush, but I'll make the color. I like this, not too overpowering, but still has a little sheen to it. A subtle glimmer. Those swords are cool, but they look too dark. Let's give them some light. First, I'll set all the sword layers to alpha lock. Then I'm going to pee in the reflection off the tree glow. I'll choose the medium blend airbrush for this. So I'm lightly brushing color across the screen to apply a soft gradation effect on the bottoms of the swords. Now, the same thing with the bottom swords. Oh. L et's apply this same technique to the flourishes. As I scribble, gradually the color appears with this perfect ombre effect. Let's move on to the corner flourishes. I want to give them a little bra highlighting. This is looking really nice. Oh Looks good. Now we'll shift over to the text. The white is a bit stark, so I want to soften it with some color, so it flows in better with the overall design. For this, we will continue our blending technique. We'll keep the same brush, and I will choose tan. When I apply styles to text, first I will always duplicate the text layer and rasterize it so that it turns into a graphic. Then I hide the original text layer, but I don't delete it just in case I would need it later. I like how the tan has softened the white. Let's give it a reflection of the tree glow. Let's work on the word. I'll make this the same gold color as the dragon. I'll select the little square off to the left, which brings up the eye dropper. Then I just drag it over the dragon, drag it over the dragon, get it to select that color. We are officially in the home stretch. In this section, I want to change the color of the leaves to pop them out from the green glow. Let's choose the leaf layer. Then I'll select the adjustments tab and choose hue, saturation, and brightness. I'm just going to play around with the sliders until it looks good. One more thing, I missed adjusting Leyla Quinn's name in the last section. Let's go ahead and take care of that. As I mentioned before, I always make a duplicate of the text layer first before I apply a style. Then I hide the original text layer, and rasterize the new layer so I can work with it. Let's apply that Alpha lock. We'll do a similar look as the title with a soft green at the top. I'll go ahead and brush in a tan at the bottom. Looks good. Now for the finishing touches. I want to show you how to add texture and visual interest to the background without being overpowering. To do that, let's create a layer at the bottom, and I'll choose this leafy background. I'll keep the tan color. I'm just going to make long sweeps across the cover until it's all covered up. It looks pretty overpowering right now, but I will change the settings. On the layer. I'll click on the end and I'm going to change the filter to add. I'll move back the opacity until there's just a hint of texture. It's a little bit hard to see on the screen, but there's just a fatness of texture throughout the cover. Now we'll finish the scene with a starry sky. I'll make a new layer. And I'll select the glitter seven brush for this. I've sped this process up, but all I'm doing is tapping to add stars at random in the same color as the tree glow. There it is. Our fantasy book cover is all done. 6. Class Project: Now that you've gone through the process of designing a fantasy book cover with me, I want you to feel comfortable designing one on your own, using the techniques from this tutorial. You're welcome to use the brush set for the cover design, or you can certainly use your own graphics. The most important thing to remember is to have fun creating this. The assignment for your project is to design a fantasy e book cover with these features. Center aligned symmetrical elements, a black or dark background, an Image or graphic that serves as the main focal point, have a back glow and or highlights in the elements, and use a bul pont preferably something with flourishes or seraps. You can also add in some finishing touches to pop out your cover. I can't wait to see what you design. 7. Final Thoughts: You made it. I am so proud of you. And I hope that this class has been helpful for learning how to design a professional quality fantasy cover and procreate using a vers set. Remember, as with any new skill, it takes practice. And the more you practice, the better you'll be. It's a rare day that I'm not doodling something on my iPad. And if you're like me, you'll find that designing book covers can be quite therapeutic. I invite you to post your projects in the project gallery below. And if you decide to share them on social media, please tag me at Donny Underscore Wile, or on TikTok at Donnie Wikle Art. I cannot wait to see the covers you design. If you have any questions for me along the way, you can drop them below in the discussion area, or you can include a question on your project page. The brush set I provided for you in this class is a sampling of my full fantasy brush set, and I will leave the link in the resources area for those who are interested. If there's another type of book cover design class you would be interested in, please let me know in the comments. I'm Donny Michael. Thanks for hanging out with me, and I will see you in the next video.