Book Cover Illustrations

K. Rowe’s Sci-Fi Adventure Space Available in a Kindle version as well as print. As I prepared to create this book cover illustration, it presented a rather odd problem; one of the central elements for the cover (and one of the running jokes in the plot line) is an alien artifact that looks like a […]

The third book in Stuart Jaffe’s Max Porter paranormal mystery series is now out. The mystery Southern Belle can be found at Amazon in both Kindle and print formats. There were several interesting challenges in creating this book cover illustration. Foremost was the need to make it appear similar to the previous two book illustrations […]

I often have folks tell me that I’ve captured the emotions of a character created for a book cover perfectly. Or that I’ve created a really pretty face on a character. There are a few tricks to make such things happen. And they aren’t quite what you might think they’d be. In fact, there’s a […]

One of this week’s illustration projects was to rework and update my illustration of Eleanor of Aquitaine that I did seven years ago for a historic book written by Robert Fripp. The original book cover project was tricky because the only recorded “picture” of Eleanor of Aquitaine was a medieval statue along with some contemporary […]

I got word today that Patricia Little’s fantasy novel is now in print. Creating the cover for The Blue Between went through a number of steps — with several false starts — before arrived at the final illustration for the book. First, here’s a short blurb about the story: Sixteen-year-old Heather Lucas is the freak […]

I’m happy to announce that my fantasy graphic novel Witches and Fish is now available in both print and Kindle versions at Amazon.com. It’s basically… well, I don’t know exactly what it is. A graphic novel? Somewhat. Surreal and Jungian? Very much so. And it’s full of original, fanciful artwork (100-plus illustrations) that I created for […]

Into every blog about the publishing industry and book cover designing, a little miscellanea must fall — and this is that post. Kobo continues to try to capture more of the e-reader market. Here’s its latest new ebook reader. I suspect that in the future, the ebook and printed book will diverge as much as, […]

How do you decide what the front illustration should be on your book cover? There’s a tendency for the writer to want to have “everything but the kitchen sink” on the front of the book. Every important plot element and every character… But that’s a mistake. Such attempts just become a jumble of “stuff” to […]

The last ten years have seen a major shift in our business from creating illustrations for larger publishers toward clients who are self-publishing authors or small presses. And ebook covers have become a large part of that work (though generally these are generated from the print version of the covers we create). One of the […]

I recently took a little time off to create four pictures for the consideration for the editor of a science fiction magazine that hopefully will be taking flight soon. In the meantime, I thought I’d show off my artwork. Please note that while these are under consideration by the editor, nothing is set in stone […]