Art by Eli Lobo

Book Cover Erik

27 November 2024

I wanted to draw the Erik from the original cover painted by André Castaigne on The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux with some changes, mainly his hat and his mask, to match the text a little closer. I prefer a smiling Erik over the more melancholy depictions. I referenced my own hand. Unfortunately, the hat I drew originally was more accurate before I turned it into a fedora. It turns out that fedoras weren't invented until 1890, a few years after the events in the book. So, his hat actually probably looked more like Robert Englund's Phantom in the 1989 movie or the hat in V for Vendetta.

Here is the drawing with the cloth part of the mask filled in using Photoshop's content-aware fill.