Redwall Artist Chris Dunn Explains His Process

Contributed by LordTBT at 5:02 p.m. GMT, 21 November 2022

German publisher Cross-Cult is out with a new video featuring Redwall cover artist Chris Dunn. The video, which was likely filmed at the time these photographs were taken, showcases Dunn in his home studio in Calne, England, where he explains how he created the cover artwork for the forthcoming Cross-Cult edition of Mossflower, scheduled for publication in early December. And if you missed it, a few days ago we reviewed the new Cross-Cult edition of Redwall.

Watch the video now to hear Dunn discuss how he creates the covers from start-to-finish, a five day process. You can also read a transcript below.

So this is the process for making the Redwall Mossflower book cover.

I start off doing lots of little thumbnail drawings and I pick one that I like. And this is the scene that I went for.

And when I'm doing a rough drawing, like this, I find lots of reference in the books, online, or if I can I'll go out and take lots of photographs, looking for certain trees, which is what I did, and the river, maybe not the pirate ship - it's not so easy finding pirate ship photographs. And then I draw this, and if the client, Cross-Cult, are happy with it, I turn it into a watercolor painting.

So the process of getting it onto watercolor paper is a bit convoluted. But I scan it into Photoshop, enlarge it, then flip it, so it's a reverse image. And then once I've got that print it off, to a bit of thin paper so you can see through it just about. And then trace this with a very soft pencil, flip it over, pop it onto some watercolor paper, like this.

And the watercolor paper is stretched so it will always dry flat, so I can get lots of detail on here and the way it scans to be reproduced later on, it's really easy to take a photograph because it's completely flat.

So once you've got that, you pop it on there, and you get a bone folder...and then rubbing, burnishing over the top to transfer the the lead, the soft lead onto the watercolor paper.

Once you've got that, you've got like a ghost image, and you get quite a hard, sharp pencil and you do the line work. So no shading, just the outline of everything you need. And that can take quite a while, maybe a day, to get all of that done.

And then once all the line work is done you can get the paints out and start painting away. Start it off with a really big brush, well not that big, and then getting down to sort of super tiny little things, like that, for the extra fine detail. And keep painting away.

And then eventually, here's what I made earlier, you get to this. But that's five days, probably, of painting. And that's it! Easy as that.

Redwall Wiki | Brian Jacques and Redwall Information

Redwall Artist Chris Dunn Explains His Process

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