This book cover illustration was created for Bram Stoker’s Dracula. I had wanted to try my hand at a genuinely spooky scene for a while, and the book had been sitting on my reading list for years. It seemed like the perfect excuse to finally dive into one of the great classics of the genre.

For the cover, I imagined a deserted old village at night. The scene ist silent and almost completely empty, creating an eerie sense of stillness. A gigantic yellow moon hangs over the city, cropped by the edge of the image, while the silhouette of an enormous bat stretches between the moon and the rooftops. I wanted the scene to feel ominous without showing too much, leaving the city itself to create much of the unease.

This illustration took quite a while to come together. I worked through several different approaches before eventually settling on the stark combination of black, grey and yellow. I also drew a lot of inspiration from Mike Mignola’s Dracula comic and his approach to creating atmosphere with bold shapes, strong silhouettes and dramatic contrasts. It was a real pleasure to spend so much time exploring how to make a scene feel unsettling with just a few simple elements.