Book Cover Illustrations

A character sketch created for the book cover I’m working on for Suzy Dingle’s YA novel Shamazan. We needed a “girl next door” look – and hopefully this works for that. The book cover itself is proving challenging due to the variety of light/dark areas, including a glowing liquid. Getting everything to work is a […]

I recently wrote a small article for Dr. Shelley Carson’s blog page. For those unfamiliar with Dr. Carson, she teaches an award-winning (and very popular) course “Creativity: Madmen, Geniuses, and Harvard Students” at Harvard. Over the years, I’ve had the pleasure to exchange emails with her, discussing how my various experiences have influenced my own […]

Some in the art community fear that Washington DC politicians may cut funding to the arts (NEA, etc.) in an effort to get the budget in check. My take? Please make the cuts. Right to the bone. Every April 14th I send the IRS a big chunk of my earnings. Probably you do, too. I […]

A book cover illustration and layout that I’ve been working on over the last couple of weeks for Dr. David Gelber’s non-fiction book Behind the Mask. The colors in the illustration were a little tricky since normally hospital surgeries are well lit in spotless white environments — which dictated either boxing a whitish picture in […]

Dr. Shelley Carson has been researching creativity for some years now, and we often exchange emails. She recently asked me to write a small comment on how some of my artwork had influenced me on a personal level — and this is the result. The artwork is the illustration I created for Dale Allan’s novel […]

Theodora Goss recently posted an interesting entry on her blog “On Beauty.” She explores the idea of beauty and how our perceptions of beauty tend to follow mathematical fractal patterns found in nature. This reminded me of some very different experiments using software to create “beauty” by combining facial characteristics from a number of photos. […]

One of the first steps of creating a book cover illustration is generally making several sketches for the client to inspect, hopefully starting the process toward the final cover layout. During this time, I often create one or more pictures that are rejected while another course is pursued toward the concept that will become the […]

Last week’s book cover project involved creating an illustration and titling for Duane Kolilis’ novel Henshin. Since the book will initially be released in Kindle format, we had two concerns: That the picture look good at the lower resolution of the Kindle (which is about a third of a print picture of the same size), […]

Last year I did the graphic design, layout, and illustration (and used a typeface I’d designed) for Richard Thieme’s Mind Games. Yesterday I discovered that it’s possible to read/explore most of the book online with the “look inside” feature at Amazon.com. I never know what to think about the “look inside” feature. In theory it […]

I recently created a portfolio to mail to potential clients in the publishing industry. Since folks contact me from time to time asking for prints of my work, I decided to make the book available to the public — so those wanting prints may purchase the book. There are 34 pictures in all, many full-page […]