Book Cover Illustrations

Another round of “sneak previews” of the illustrations for John Chadwell’s graphic novel Werewolves of New Idria (Moonstone Books). The illustrations have an added level of complexity in that we’re trying to keep them (as the story itself) historically accurate with the uniforms, armor, firearms, swords, motor cycles, etc., etc. Given that the story line […]

I figured it was about time for an update on the B&W book illustrations I’m doing for John Chadwell’s graphic novel Werewolves of New Idria (Moonstone Books). Since the story was written with a film version in mind, Moonstone settled on the “wide vision” format for this graphic novel giving each picture a movie-picture-like perspective […]

Richard Thieme’s Mind Games continues to garner good reviews. I found one posted at Amazon.com by J. M. Arrigo (who is, I am told, a professor familiar with intelligence operations). Here are some excepts: This extraordinary book of short stories draws the reader into multiple levels of reality and multiple dimensions. The settings are mostly […]

Here’s the new book cover illustration I just completed for C.A. Dawson’s Frozen in Time. The final version also has a distant spaceship (missing from this version) and a few other modifications here and there. ===================== Duncan Long is a freelance book cover illustrator for HarperCollins, PS Publishing, Pocket Books, Solomon Press, Fort Ross, and […]

I thought perhaps I’d been a little hard on Corel in a previous post. So, having heard nice things about Draw X5 (I’m currently using version 8), I decided to take the newer version for a spin. OK… You can probably guess where this story is headed. But just in case… I plunked down my […]

Finding just the right typeface for a book is tricky. It’s a little like adding a spice during food preparation. You want enough to give things the proper flavor, but you don’t want to add so much of the spice that it draws attention to itself. Typefaces are like that. Beginning designers, like green cooks, […]

I just completed the book cover illustration for Dora Machado’s Stonewiser III, available from Mermaid Press later this year (or possibly early 2011). Machado’s first two book (which I also had the pleasure of creating book cover illustrations for) have garnered a number of awards, and everyone’s hopeful for this third book in the trilogy. […]

It is one thing to self-publish. Quite another to make money at it. Many beginners assume that if they right the book about the better mouse trap, the world will beat a path to their door. Sadly, that seldom happens. There are three things a title needs to succeed in today’s marketplace: Promotion, promotion, promotion. […]

Over the years I’ve found that sometimes, at least with artistic conundrums, the best solution is to run away. Let me explain. Sometimes in writing, illustration, or composing music, the artist manages to paint himself into a corner. The sentence that was going so well suddenly comes to a phrase that doesn’t have a good […]

From time to time beginning illustrators contact me to ask whether Photoshop or Corel Painter is the better choice for digital illustration work. I think in fact there’s no wrong choice to make. After an artist gets used to the digital “landscape” of a program and using a tablet (I recommend Wacom tablets, by the […]