The NightHorse Cometh

I recently drew this image as an album cover for the very talented(and Irish!) band, Super Extra Bonus Party. It's for their new LP 'NightHorses', which is released this month and I'm very much looking forward to hearing.
I'll stick up the step-by-step process, just so ye can see how the magic(cough) happens.

First off, the concept that I put to the guys. The brief was to have a horse in space wearing armour and being shot at by attackers with rayguns, so the piece designed itself really...


Here are the pencils, no significant changes from the rough other than I flipped the image as I thought it read better the opposite way.

And so onto the inked piece. I was asked to make the horse's head bigger as the fact that he was actually a HORSE might be getting a little lost in there. So I embiggened his noggin a tad. A good call by the band.

Here's my first stab at the colouring. I think it has some decent elements, but on reflection the image looks a bit washed out and the planes needed to be more defined.


Here's the final version. The band wanted the NightHorse to stand out against the BG more, so we lightened him up while darkening his linework, and threw some darker blue hues behind him to pop him a bit more.


And that's my heroic story.