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I should have been working on other things today, but I wanted to take another stab at the 2E covers. Below are the current working versions. I also came up a few other variants as I worked on them today, but didn't like any of the other iterations. I am still working on the placement of the VBAM 2E logo at the bottom, and still tweaking other visual elements.









Any and all feedback is welcome!

I like all of the them. Reminds me of sci-fi book covers for Baen books etc

Wow!! I like the covers! My favorite is the campaign guide! I do like how not all races are humanoid.

Yeah, they look like professionally-made sci-fi novel covers.

All of these covers were illustrated by a Spanish artist named Luis Nunez de Castro Torres. He contacted us several years ago and, like most of those kinds of emails, I checked out his portfolio to see what kind of work he'd done. I was pretty impressed, so we contacted him and had him do the artwork for the Those Who Serve cover. When 2E became a reality, we then contracted with him to do several more covers for us.

One of the things I liked about Luis' work is that some of it had Lovecraftian vibes that I thought would work great for realizing some neat alien species. Like Redspace07 noted, most sci-fi tends to focus exclusively on humanoid aliens, but I personally like my aliens to be a bit more, well, alien -- so I definitely encouraged Luis to go that direction with the art.

In these cover tests, I tried messing around with some hex overlays at the top and bottom (and, in other drafts, along the sides). What's the consensus: do the hex overlays look good or end up detracting from the cover art?

I like the covers, and think the hex overlays work well.

It's a little easy to miss the small logos and text identifying what game these awesome-looking covers are for. Otherwise they look fantastic! The Campaign Guide especially looks really cool and epic.

All the covers are winners. I too like the Hex overlay at the top and bottom. Seeing the hexes just brings out the Grognard in me. I almost convinced my wife to put in a hexagonal grid pattern Vinyl flooring in my basement; it would have been colder in the winter than the carpeting we eventually got, but it would have been glorious !

Vandervecken wrote:I almost convinced my wife to put in a hexagonal grid pattern Vinyl flooring in my basement; it would have been colder in the winter than the carpeting we eventually got, but it would have been glorious !

That sir, would have been glorious indeed. Did she know your real objective when you suggested the hex floor?

-Jay

Tyrel Lohr wrote:All of these covers were illustrated by a Spanish artist named Luis Nunez de Castro Torres. He contacted us several years ago and, like most of those kinds of emails, I checked out his portfolio to see what kind of work he'd done. I was pretty impressed, so we contacted him and had him do the artwork for the Those Who Serve cover. When 2E became a reality, we then contracted with him to do several more covers for us.

One of the things I liked about Luis' work is that some of it had Lovecraftian vibes that I thought would work great for realizing some neat alien species. Like Redspace07 noted, most sci-fi tends to focus exclusively on humanoid aliens, but I personally like my aliens to be a bit more, well, alien -- so I definitely encouraged Luis to go that direction with the art.

In these cover tests, I tried messing around with some hex overlays at the top and bottom (and, in other drafts, along the sides). What's the consensus: do the hex overlays look good or end up detracting from the cover art?

Well kudos to your artist very impressive work. I truly LIKE the hex overlays

The readability of the book names could be increased if I took the cover art itself and put it within a black "container" with rounded corners, so you would have black bars on the sides and top and the name moved up above. I had a few variations where I tried that. Here's an example from one of the versions I did Saturday:



My only problem is that it covers up the artwork a bit, though I might be able to fix that if the entire artwork was scaled down to fit on the cover, with black bars on both sides instead of just on one.

I'd take a little more black border to allow for the FULL picture at a slightly reduced size. That artwork is just too good to be covered up. But if others don't want the cover art reduced in size, I can see why that is a good thing as well.

*Jay* Oh yea, wife knew exactly what I had in mind (Maybe the drool gave my intentions away); but concrete basement floors in a Minnesnowta winter need carpeting to be made into a "Family" room, the hex pattern Vinyl would have made the basement into a 3 season 'Man Cave'. Wife won arguement when she showed me pictures of my kids (and I had no pictures of Battletech or SFB miniatures to counter).