As a teaser for their forthcoming instructional DVD, Book Cover Illustration with Dan Dos Santos, San Francisco's Massive Black studio has released a video that condenses the time and effort spent into creating the cover for Brandon Sanderson's new fantasy novel, Warbreaker, into five-and-a-half minutes.

On his own website, Dos Santos has an extensive gallery of cover art that fantasy and science fiction fans might well recognize... but I'm not quite done with the subject of videos that teach you how to create art for books yet...

"I'm going to show you how to draw my character, Detective Jermain," Brooklyn-based illustrator MMisako Takashima (who publishes under the name Misako Rocks!) promises at the start of this video, the first in a series promoting a graphic novel collection debuting from Henry Holt's young readers division this fall.

Unfortunately, the subsequent footage doesn't quite live up to expectations; yes, it starts off with a blank page and ends with touch-ups to Jermain's hair color and dress, and apart from the early pencil stages where it's hard to see the lines, especially in a video compressed for YouTube, it's fun footage in and of itself. But it's not "how to," and in some ways I think that's a bit of a lost opportunity. Takashima shows a lot of enthusiasm in her brief introduction, and it would have been fun to watch that enthusiasm continue as she talked viewers through the process of drawing Jermain—during which time one could easily imagine her talking about what appeals to her about the character, and the type of stories she wants to tell, and all that. Of course, that's a heck of a lot more than anyone has a right to ask of a four-minute video, I know.

(Why, yes, I did watch The Joy of Painting when I was young; how did you guess?)