Matías Bergara unveils his painting process

Part One of our Behind The Love: the cover series

Folks, Elsa here! I’m over the moon to start our series with Matías Bergara and his illustrative genius. He’s got some incredible insight on his process, so take it all in!

If you’re interested in picking up Matías’ 1:25 Incentive cover (and by the end of this post, you WILL be), the Diamond preorder code for it is: JUN220030.

Matías, the floor’s yours…

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For cover work I usually aim to create a compelling or eye-catching image, since I consider them to function for that purpose first of all. Simple colors, bold compositions and clear hierarchy of elements will always do the trick - in this sense, I tend to think more in design than in drawing terms when I'm doing a cover. It's a completely different mentality than the one I fall into when I'm drawing a comic book page or other sort of narrative illustration, and I find myself frequently deciding what things not to put in unnecessarily to avoid ruining the visual clarity of the image I'm trying to build.

1) INSPIRATION - Since LE starts off in a nice vintage 20th century setting I went directly to 20's and 30's ad / poster illustration references, which are some of my favourite of all time. I especially cherish the blend of illustrative /painterly effort and sleek and clever color and typography design of the era.
Here you can see just two examples of incredibly well thought and designed illustrations that were used in ads for.... towels and linen. You can find countless other similarly gorgeous ads for a myriad mundane and boring things like talc, tires or socks.

Young women of this era were regularly depicted with short bob haircuts and caps / hats with streamlined looks and I pictured Joan looking a bit like that during some point in the past.

2) LAYOUT - At first I only had in my mind the orange over black floral pattern (with concealed weapons and arms to imply the violence), which is very infrequent for me.

Most times I start off with pencil roughs of figures, things or places and then do color layouts. In this case I just did a digital color sketch and immediately thought of turning it into sheets and covers for our complex lovers for a top-down look on them. 

I toyed with this idea for some minutes, moving them around different corners of the image. Suddenly I realized the pattern looked good for a coat or cape and changed the image into a large figure by drawing white empty space around it with an appealing shape.

The face was drawn last over the figure and the image was already working very good with the title design so I stuck to it and rigorously transferred the whole image to an A3 sheet of watercolor paper by tracing the digital sketch over a light screen. 

3) PAINTING STEPS - First off, I used a very thin liner to ink the exterior profile of the figure, her features, and the patterns. This allows me to erase all the pencil and clean the sheet completely before painting - and to avoid losing sight of the pencil lines (the paint will cover them). 
Since 90% of the figure was to be covered by either oranges / browns or black, I applied an uniform mix of liquitex ink and watercolor over the whole figure first - except for the face area. Then, after drying, I covered the black areas carefully with ink. You can see in this early stage that both colors were working very well. I like it very much, even in this incomplete form, which could have been even stronger visually if left this way, but at the expense of losing a bit of information and complexity along the way. 
The ink is not perfectly uniform, nor the orange below it, but that is the whole point of painting instead of just doing it digitally. There are a million little textures and variations (sadly no reproduction will ever present the eye with as much richness as the kind you get when looking closely at the original in real life). 

The face was painted last in a blueish-greenish muited tone with subtle warm pencil highlights. This "cold" palette is meant to break or cut through the warm uniformity of the rest of the figure for balance, and it also suggests of an unnatural state of things for her. 

I loved doing this cover and also thank the whole team for inviting me to take part of this incredible story. 

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Elsa again! Huge thanks to Matías for his mind-blowing cover and for taking the time to put together such a detailed process for it. I learned a lot myself!

Keep an eye out tomorrow for Part 2 of our cover series :)

Elsa