Book Cover Illustrations

Since I often find myself creating illustrations for science fiction book covers (as well as an occasional magazine), I’ve been busy buying and creating a variety of robot 3D models. These serve as the reference models — or sometimes even the starting point for my digital painting — that then lead to the final illustration […]

Several years back, I decided to get serious about creating 3D models to serve as the starting point for my book cover paintings and illustrations. The big plus of a 3D model is that it can be rapidly posed to create a “reference photo” for painting the final book cover artwork. My adoption of 3D […]

I recently completed the cover layout and illustrations for Stephen Quayle’s Empire Beneath the Ice. Steve’s book deals in part with the German Nazis who worked on “flying saucer” aircraft as well as those Germans who explored Antarctica before and during World War II. So to bring both elements together on the book cover, I […]

I got a nice surprise in the mail yesterday: Artist’s copies of the November / December issue of Muse magazine. Inside, the six illustrations I did for the short story “Twins Again” by Eric Picholle. The science fiction tale is about two twins, one who stays on Earth while the other ventures into space. The […]

I recently had the pleasure of creating the book cover art and layout for Gunfight on the Alpha Centauri Express by John Bowers. This is book five of the Nick Walker, U.F. Marshal series, and now is available in the Kindle format at Amazon.com. The novel features a lawman who is charged with keeping the […]

After decades of creating book layouts, and even more years as a reader, I’ve come to realize that some typefaces are much better than others for book text. If you’re doing the work yourself, the best choice is a tried and true older typeface. These fonts generally are “invisible” to the reader right from the […]

I just got word that Al Philipson’s Last Train from Earth: Holy Christian Empire – 2206 is now available for preorder. OK… I know I’m a little biased — but I love this cover. It has to be one of my favorites. My original illustration is shown above. I did a little cheating when creating […]

Over the years, I’ve found that sometimes clients can’t get a good idea of what an illustration will look like because their monitors aren’t properly calibrated. While today’s monitors generally do a pretty good job of reproducing the correct color ranges that will appear in a print picture, they don’t do so well with the […]

Another of the new cover illustrations for John Bowers’ science fiction “Starport” series of novels. As the title shows, this is for Prisoners of Eroak. This cover presented a problem that is often encountered in creating book covers: A title that takes up two lines, thereby dictating that the illustration have more “real estate” at its […]

We’ve had a busy couple of weeks creating new book cover illustrations for some of John Bowers’ science fiction “Starport” novels. Above is the final artwork created for book three in the science fiction series Famine Planet. One of the main characters in this novel is introduced in the previous book of the series, and I’d created […]