Advanced Inking: Sandman cover

In my advanced Inking class we had to make a cover for an existing comic franchise. I chose Sandman because almost none of the actual covers have any of the main characters on the cover. I also wanted to play around with an art nouveau style.

Here are my thumbnails. I went with the one on the left.

Usually I would refine this sketch in photoshop and then print in blue line, but I instead decided to draw the entire thing traditionally. Here is a scan of my pencil drawing. I actually did my pencil drawing with a light blue col-erase prismacolor pencil, but I changed it to greyscale so that its easier to see here.

Here is my first pass at the final inks.

 And here is my final Ink pass where I added the sand being thrown by Morpheus across the page. I made this effect by using splatter from a toothbrush using both white and black ink layers, and a literal mask i made from paper to get the clean edge.

And here is the final treated black and white image. I plan to color it some time soon.

The biggest critiques I received in class were that Morpheus' robe is black so push the blacks on him, and that will help pull out the sand across his form. Also, the circles in the background, while very art nouveau, are a bit distracting. Other than those, I am very pleased with this piece.