Book Cover Illustrations

From time to time, I get the chance to create a book cover illustration of a historic character. This gets a little tricky because often the “historic” pictures of them are another ancient artist’s notion of what the character looked like — often incorporating elements that are in fashion or vogue within the culture and […]

Dragons, like the water dragon above (about to snatch a pair of pirates), are not easy to paint. Their complexity makes an artist devise painting shortcuts and hone his skill. And while dragons may be mythical creatures, everyone seems to have a pretty specific idea of what they should look like. And if the artwork […]

Dieselpunk is a science fiction genre that’s recently gained in popularity. It’s not actually new — there are throwbacks here and there, with alternative timelines and the like in science fiction movies and books. But it’s new to many readers and movie goers who are running into it today. The Dieselpunk genre generally employs a […]

For many years, magazines and books used black and white or grayscale illustrations in their text. This cut the printing costs since only one ink was being used, while still supplying some visual interest, as well as capturing buyers who leafed through the publication at a newsstand. Over the years, these illustrations pretty much vanished […]

When I was a kid, the light pollution from mercury vapor lamps on farms as well as street lights from nearby urban areas wasn’t too bad yet, and we could sit in our backyard, look up, and see the Milky Way in the night time sky along with innumerable closer stars. We even spotted a […]

Lately, I’ve been employing 3D character creation for realistic book cover and magazine illustrations — sort of “photographs of the impossible.” The obvious big plus here is that I can offer the realism of a photo while creating art that would be impossible (or very expensive) to photograph. This process of creating science fiction book […]

Sometimes, some pretty strange characters need to be illustrated for book and magazine stories. Whether science fiction, fantasy, or horror, often a weird monster (big or small) is key to the plot as well as hooking a reader. So I find myself assembling some pretty strange characters when illustrating such stories. As of late I’ve […]

Over the last couple of years, I’ve shifted from the (digital) painting of figures for book and magazine illustrations to employing 3D models in-house which I then use as references for painting the book cover figure. The big plus of the 3D modeling is that I don’t have to start over should a client say, […]