The Curse of Peladon

This was a tricky one to come up with a concept for for two reasons. One is there are so many interesting-looking aliens in it that it's too tempting to get them all on even at the risk of cluttering the illustration. Second, they're not all villains (and the style for my covers is to focus on the bad guys), most notably the most recognisable - the Ice Warriors. However, you can't have a Peladon cover without them, and to leave them off because they're on the Doctor's side this once would give away that twist. Conversely, too much of a focus on Arcturus as the true villain would give that away. So really it has to feature all the suspects, Peladonian and off-worlders, plus Aggedor of course. Crikey!

Not only that, I really wanted to feature the wonderful castle model, especially as I knew it would site across the bottom of the illustration nicely. So after playing around with various shape-based divisions (similar to my Silver Nemesis cover) I chose instead to take a leaf from my short-lived new series range and divide the composition into strips for each character. Then it was just a case of choosing suitable shots, adding different coloured overlays to clarify the divisions, and lastly a way to mark the edges of the strips so they didn't just bleed messily into each other. Some new lightning brushes I recently found got their first use over the castle.

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