doctorbaer

https://www.youtube.com/@madebykokoro

A piece I worked on during my trip to San Diego for the American Library Association Annual Conference. It was a fun trip where I got to promote Doctor Baer to librarians, reconnect with friends, and check out the San Diego Padres’ baseball park (sadly, they weren’t playing at home that weekend).

It’s feeling like book tour/promo mode is officially underway, and it’s a wild feeling. I’ll have more reflections to share in text and in future Fabulous Secrets microcasts.

My thanks to Chloe Cordero for the color assists on this piece.

As the school year came to a close, and my full-time residencies ended, I excitedly began ramping up development for the next Doctor Baer story.

Here’s our monk leading us to the abbey (formerly a church) hiding a dangerous secret.

I’m continuing to look for ways to streamline the drawing process, and leaning on 3d models seems to be the way to go. Here’s the model of the abbey:

I didn’t build this one, though. I hired a Blender artist to create it and the entire town where the story takes place:

This low-polygon representation won’t be useful for making an animation or video game, but it’s exactly what I need to streamline the process of drawing various scenes in Clip Studio Paint.

I’ll say more about the influences behind the locations as I make more development drawings.

The Inscrutable Doctor Baer and the Case of the Two-Faced Statue is now available for preorder on Indiebound and Amazon, so I think that counts as a cover reveal!

So let’s take a look at some of the concepts I created to find the final cover design. Please note that these were all made before I had to change the character’s name:

This was my favorite one. I liked the journey into mystery, with the threatening face on the cave’s mouth behind them. As if to say they might not know the danger they’re walking into. Very Duck Tales-ish.

The Indiana Jones movie poster version.

An adaptation of the original teaser image, I felt like this one reflected the types of covers found on readalikes. Kind of a movie poster, but the details are dialed back for clarity.

By the time I got to the 4th sketch, I felt like I was out of ideas. Feeling a little urgency to finish with at least 5 concepts, I sketched out a spiral that would lead to the title. I didn’t know what I was going to do with it, but practice has shown me that putting something on the page to respond to often works. This moment doesn’t happen in the book, but it sums up the vibe pretty well. So well, in fact, that my editor said this was the cover we needed to go with!

Just selling the tone of playful, spooky adventure with this one.

This one has a lot of storytelling in it. But I think it would work better for a monthly comic than a graphic novel.

And one more take at the fifth sketch with a different color scheme.

I liked them all, but I think my editor was right to pick number four. It passes the squint test, the pink ghosts really pop, and the heroes are descending into unknown danger. Which one would you have chosen?

To celebrate the preorder launch, I’ve put together the first video trailer for the book:

Thanks to everyone who has preordered! I can’t wait to share this book with you.