I am indebted to Maksim Bugrimov who created his Adventure Character which I adopted as Sam.
His portfolio is at https://www.artstation.com/maxbugor.
The movel I used for Quinn was a character named Milena made by Rukha93 whose portfolio is at https://sketchfab.com/rukha93.
I used Mixamo to move the models into different poses.
After that I brought them into Unity and positioned them together and lit them.
Then I took screenshots and added text in Photoshop.
As you will see if you read the notes on each image, I realized Sam needed a scar. At first I painted one on the 2D image but it wasn't very convincing so I made a scar and placed it directly on his model. It's interesting, because actually it's an awful scar, but I have lit him so brightly, it barely shows in the images.
Then I got tired of Quinn not having enough clothes, so I used the UMA add-on to give her clothes in Unity and did the poses again.
And after all that, I decided her pose wasn't aggressive enough so I warped her in Photoshop. As if Quinn has not had enough travails in life already!
So that is the process, or pipeline, as they call it in creative industries.
Naively, I thought that was the end of the creative process, but in fact it was the beginning. After that I had to work on the text to make it clear and meaningful. I don't think that process is ever ended, I have just given up for now!
Final CMYK cover for Book 2 after I discovered the arc warp tool was not just for text.
