DRAGON KNIGHT!

[Aikanaro]

Couple of quick points. Since you are designing for a cover. You need to leave negative space in your composition for text. If you look at a lot of book and CD covers and the artwork, in the good ones, the artwork has been specifically designed and composed to leave that space somewhere (top or bottom, or both) I think you need to build that in to your thumbs.

At the moment I'm not feeling 1,2 or 3. Not necessarily because they don't have some interesting things going on with the knight pose etc, but compositionally they are all very similar. The head seems too large a major shape with no interesting negative spaces and the castles are shoved off onto an edge. 3 might be interesting if you bring the dragon and knight into the bottom third or 2 thirds of the image only, and maybe have a castle or wings adding some less detailed but interesting background behind them for negative space and the title. 4 is the most different. An interesting perspective , the composition is very symmetrical but that's not necessarily a bad thing, enough space for text.
I think you should do a lot more sketches and try and play with very different ideas instead of minor variations of the same idea, to really explore the subject. And the focus should be on composition at this sketching stage more than anything else.
Also you can try out this technique for thumbnailing. http://muddycolors.blogspot.co.nz/2012/1...nails.html
And another one for understanding very basic value schemes in composition: http://muddycolors.blogspot.co.nz/2012/0...cture.html

Have you gathered any reference besides the original image? Things for compositional ideas, or maybe other metal album covers with dragons or creatures or something? There is a lot of great art out there, may as well use it to help inform your own vision.

Hope that helps.

I'm just doing these for fun and to get some practice so I'm not going to add text to it. Also, I'm really digging the idea of making the head big enough so the knight can stand/sit on it because i want to show as much detail as i can from the knight and dragon head. Can that position work? Here's another sketch, i didn't upload it because it's pretty much the same as #3. but is it any better?