Book Cover Illustrations

Dolls are normally a cheerful toy that many a young child cherishes. Yet there’s something sort of spooky about their lifelike qualities of a doll, and it isn’t rate to see a child become a bit terrified when first being exposed the “uncanny valley” of human-like toys. Little wonder then that more than a few […]

One of the more troubling and often horrifying inventions of story telling occurs when something we’ve come to expect to be good turns out to be bad. These quickly transform the things of everyday life into the monsters from the dark corners of the mind. Invasion of the Body Snatchers as well as many movies […]

I recently had the pleasure of creating the book cover illustration as well as the graphic design and layout for the cover of Kathryn H. Clark’s memoir My Odyssey. After several false starts, a friend of the author sat down with her and created a sketch which we then followed greatly simplifying the process as […]

I recently had the pleasure of creating the illustration above for Troy A. Rutter’s upcoming, young adult science fiction novel Journey to Phaedra. The author approached me about creating a cover illustration with possibly hundreds of suspended animation pods on the inside of a large spaceship bay, with one large one that had opened to […]

Halloween witches have varied over the years from the comical creations of Disney to the more sinister women of horror movies. They’ve got mixed reviews, from the too-real Salem Witch trials to the sorceresses of Greek myth to the friendly witches of TV comedy series. Some are portrayed as beguilingly beautiful; others as terrifying hags. […]

In 2009 I created an illustrated version of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” which I’ve been giving away for free since then (it is available to read online or download in PDF format at Scribd). In addition to the horror illustrations I created for this short book, I also designed a typeface — and hid […]

Ghost are terrifying to even think about. Generally they’re seen as the spirits of the dead, trapped between worlds due to something that went amiss when they died. Perhaps an even more terrifying theory is that they’re really demons posing as dead souls to trick human beings in a variety of ways; it isn’t your […]

In my childhood, Halloween was a more innocent time. Since then, one can feel the evil influences and while these have certainly done much to energize parts of the entertainment industry and put a few entertainment thrills and chills into readers and audiences, it is not without a downside. I often would like a little […]

Vampires have terrified audiences since ancient story tellers conjured them up hundreds of years ago. Bram Stoker codified today’s notion of what a vampire should be with his novel Dracula. One odd twist to the story is that vampire bats were discovered AFTER Stoker had made his character a bat that drank blood. Yes, sometimes […]

One of the things that terrifies almost anyone sometime during their life is the fear of death. And often that fear is inherent in Halloween, a holiday based on various cultures’ beliefs that the dead might walk among us during certain times of the year. So here are a few of my illustrations dealing with […]