From Cubicle 7:
The English language edition of Kuro will feature a brand new cover created by Paul Bourne! We dragged Paul away from his busy schedule to ask him some questions about making the new cover to Kuro.
How do you make your images? They look really real!
It depends on the image to be honest. The Kuro cover was a combination of 2D and 3D. The background alleyway and figure were built from the ground up as 3D models. They were lit and rendered separately with a little bit of the atmosphere. Both images were then brought into Photoshop where they were combined and coloured. I then added the graffiti, a few more signs and the final atmospherics.
There’s a real cinematic feel to your work. Is that a deliberate choice? And if so how do you get that feel in there?
Yeah, this cover in particular needed to be something akin to a movie poster, so a heavy atmosphere with lots of smoke lends itself to that quite well. To get that feel it’s all about the lighting. There’s an area light illuminating the scene from above, with smaller ambient lights picking out the details and the character. There’s a slight depth of field blur overlayed and some film grain thrown over the top. It all adds up to make quite a moody scene I think.
Kuro is near-future Japanese horror. That seems like a great fit for your work. What sort of subject matter do you enjoy working on, and why?
I’ve always been a big horror and sci-fi fan, so that’s the stuff I enjoy doing the most.
Where can we see more of your art?
I don’t have a current website, as I don’t have much time to build one at the moment! But I have some stuff over on my Facebook page (http://www.facebook.com/paul.bourne.77) which I try to update with new stuff.
Thanks Paul!
