Book Cover Illustrations

I just completed the artwork for Right Hand Reign’s “Rattle of Bones” CD album cover.

I “painted” thousands of skeletons during the process, a task that would have been impossible without computer automation of the task. In fact there are only 12 different “lying down” skeletons with an additional seven or eight in various states of rising from the dead. Fortunately our brains have trouble seeing that there are only a limited number of variations when the arrangement becomes this complex, so the illusion is created that the bones are in an entirely random pattern rather than just being a very limited number.

After the basic groups were created, the bones were “sprayed” into position on the hillsides with a random distribution setting on the software.

The picture concept for the album is loosely based on the biblical account of the valley of dried bones. We started with a moonlit night and the hillsides covered with bones.

While the moonlit version of the illustration proved beautiful in a somewhat chilling sort of way, it was too “Gothic” for the CD album cover (the band is a Christian group), so I altered the night scene into a sunrise and that gave the look the band was wanting for their CD album cover artwork.

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Duncan Long is a freelance CD album cover illustrator who also creates book covers. Among those he’s created artwork for are HarperCollins, PS Publishing, Pocket Books, Solomon Press, Fort Ross, and many other publishers and self-publishing authors as well as rock bands worldwide who needed original artwork and illustrations for their CD albums. See his cover illustrations at: http://DuncanLong.com/art.html
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