Book Cover Illustrations

Several months ago I had the privilege of creating the cover for A. J. Vega’s Majesty’s Offspring. I’m happy to announce that the book has a home page now. The site is nicely done and the Prologue to the book is also available online for those wanting a sneak peek at what’s inside the covers. […]

Got an interesting email from self-publishing author John Backus about his new novel. The book has been meeting with amazing success. I find John’s experience interesting because it paints a picture of what I think the future of publishing is soon likely to be: Authors putting their own stories into print, then shepherding them to […]

I thought I’d show the progression of the covers created for the upcoming graphic novel Werewolves of New Idria (available from Moonstone Books). Up front: NORMALLY I don’t go through this many ideas to get to the final book cover illustration. This project proved a challenge and generated bunches of different versions for the cover […]

This is another book illustration I had the opportunity to have showcased in the upcoming May issue of Horror Bound Magazine. In this case, science fiction book cover artwork I created for my own novel Wrong Side In. This picture has had it’s own tale of woe. Several years ago, I wrote a science fiction […]

I had the opportunity to have some of my artwork showcased in the upcoming May issue of Horror Bound Magazine. While searching for suitable illustrations for the magazine, I discovered a few “Golden Oldies” that I thought I’d post over the next few days. Most of these (including this one) have never been used as […]

One of last week’s projects. This one is a “sketch” for Suzy Dingle’s upcoming YA novel. The various elements in the picture are painted digitally and are in their own layers so they can be rotated, re-sized, and so forth as needed. It’s likely that the final book cover illustration will undergo some changes and […]

One of last week’s projects consisted of a re-working of the cover of Lawrence P. White’s novel. The new book is actually two books combined into one, giving readers a two-fer when they buy it. The original title (now the first half of the new book) was Spirit of Empire. That became the subtitle with […]

I’ve been using TinEye the last few days to discover folks using my artwork online without permission. This is a handy little search engine that compares similarities between pictures. If I find sites using my work without permission, I then write a take-down notice, ask the user to credit me for the artwork, or whatever […]

While it’s good to keep up on what the latest trends in book cover design and artwork may be (to avoid some of the cliches if nothing else), looking to the past for inspiration is often a fruitful exercise. Penguin recently made this a little easier to do by posting a wonderful collection of the […]

Although I used to work in oil paints and pen and ink, today my illustrations (like the one above for George Blackburne’s The Reverse Multiplier Effect) are all digital, painted by pushing electrons across the screen with a Wacom digital tablet and pen. The sizes of the paintings I create for book covers are generally […]