I rarely keep records of the exact time I spend on each piece, but I'm going to estimate that this took between 15-20 hours of hand painting in Photoshop. I am really in love with the new color mixer brush in CS5! All total I think I also created 6 new brushes for the texture work, which was quite a bit of fun to experiment with.
I'm pretty happy with the end result and I'd love to hear your comments.
Here's the finished illustration:
Here's the illustration with the book cover title, spine and flap design added in:
and here are a couple random detail clips:
