Of Hearth & the Harrowing Cover
- Jared W Twing
- Aug 30
- 3 min read
Updated: Aug 30
Excited today to finally reveal to the world the cover for Of Hearth & the Harrowing by the ever talented Erin Lamoreux. This has been a long time in the works, and with this reveal the run up to final publishing has begun!
The testers, my artists, and myself are all very excited to get this game into your hands. Honestly, I can not wait. I thought it might be fun for you to see the process we went through to get to this point.
The Roughs
First Erin and I talked about the general idea of the cover. I had two ideas to start. The first idea was something inspired by Stranger Things and classic movie posters. It would have a bunch of heroes in the middle, with a titanic corruptor looming behind them. They should be standing in a village (aka their Hearth). Hearth & Harrowing right there on the cover. Erin often gives me super rough sketches in a block of several ideas. I totally want to come back to a few of these that we did not end up using. Can you spot the winner already? Heh, pretty obvious.
The second idea was for a yin and yang style composition showing a hearth in the light side and the harrowing in the dark side. The problem was the heroes had to be the focus, and I was already not sure this second idea would work.
The Drafts
So many drafts...
It is so much fun working with Erin. I knew I wanted heroes in the picture, so she added the logo to a few and then refined a few things here and there so we could really start to see them come alive.
Adding heroes and logo to the yin yang style cover made it immediately clear to me that the other cover style was just far better for what I wanted to see.
With all those drafts in hand, I set about making a final call so Erin could start really into the meat of everything. 012b above was the clear winner for me. I love the poses, I love the layout, and the general feel of everything.
Next the characters started to come to life, as Erin began refining them. Not all of the characters would remain in their initial draft form. Can you spot who didn't make the cut? Poor little guy.
There were several more drawings in between the previous one and this one, but this was the final line art. I love it to death. I'm so happy with Erin's work on this cover.
Color
Finally it was time to start adding colors. We went back and forth on font color and treatments. but this was the color block out prior to shadows and shading and all that. I also used this point to inform Erin something I forgot to tell her, the corruption is red. So the corrupted are generally red hued.
Final
Lots of rendering and work by Erin later and we got to a place I am so tickled to be able to share with everyone. The final cover, featuring four awesome heroes, a titanic corruptor, a Hearth being attacked, and she even added some corruption tentacles coming out a door in the background. So here it is in all its glory, I hope you love it at as much as I do!
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