The Last Viking Returns – front cover timelapse

The Last Viking Returns, the sequel to our children’s book The Last Viking, will be released September 1 this year.

In this post we reveal the cover for The Last Viking Returns!

I’ll also show a step-by-step look at the design of the cover, from the first rough sketch to the final drop of colour.

First off – here’s the final cover design.

The Last Viking Returns - front cover

For a step-by-step look at the design process, including a time-lapse of me colouring the cover, watch the YouTube video below.

(For the trivia-minded among you, the time-lapse represents about 4 hours work squished down into 8 minutes of footage; the whole video is 10 minutes long).

I wish I could paint this fast

Here’s a timelapse of me painting a page from The Last Viking Returns.

This page features Odin and his ravens, as well as Freya (the goddess of love and beauty), Sigurd (blacksmith to the gods), and Thor (no introduction needed).

All the illustrations in the book (including this one) were drawn with pencil, then scanned and coloured digitally using a Wacom Intuos3 graphics tablet and Photoshop CS3/Corel Painter X3.

The footage was captured using Screenium. The colouring process took 4 hours in real time.

The Last Viking Returns is the sequel to The Last Viking (2011) and is once again illustrated by James Foley (me) and written by Norman Jorgensen. All being well, it’ll be released in October 2014 by Fremantle Press!