Book Cover Illustrations

I recently had the chance to create the cover artwork and layout for John Chadwell’s new science fiction novel Legends and Liars. It was a pretty straight-forward design job with an illustration that would reflect the idea that much of the story would take place in space. The lettering then “nailed” it as a science […]

Sometimes I’m contacted by writers having questions about how to translate a script or novel into a format that would allow an artist to create a graphic novel of the story. The process is not as straight-forward as one might imagine. Many writers make the mistake of trying to put too much into each page […]

I was recently asked if I had hidden a self-portrait anywhere in Moonstone Books’ upcoming The Werewolves of New Idria. The answer (as you can see above) is yes. I did smuggle a picture of myself into the graphic novel (the picture above is low-resolution; the print version should have about 4 times as much […]

Part of yesterday’s work: A Character Concept Drawing for R.S. Guthrie’s upcoming novel Black Beast. It is still a tad cartoonish so it doesn’t blend into the realism of the rest of the cover illustration. Of course hopefully there will never be/never has been a creature like this. So making it “real” gets a little […]

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 […]

I got a nice little review and the display of some of my book illustrations and book artwork in the current issue of the ezine Writing Raw. It’s a little disconcerting working with an online publication. With print it often takes months for something to be published. With an ezine, I send the pictures and […]

Got word that the graphic novel I illustrated Werewolves of New Idria is now available for pre-order from Moonstone Books. Please note that the scheduled shipping date for this graphic novel is August 11, 2011. You can also get a “sneak peak” at some of the pictures in the graphic novel (as well as the […]