Book Cover Illustrations

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 across a horizontal page with the text above and below each picture.

I had thought that this format would be easier than working with panels – but have discovered it is not (at least not for me). The reason being that there’s easy way to accommodate more than one scene. So a lot of care and thought has to be given toward what scene will best capture the action across the story line of the page.

There’s also a tendency toward overuse of “wide shots” from a distance, or extreme closeups. While both certainly have their place, I have found it hard to avoid the temptation to get carried away with one or the other.

The limited pallet of the B&W pictures is wild to work with as well. As a guy that’s used to digital work with millions of colors, dropping down to shades of gray and black is a wild constraint that forces some careful planning and development of new techniques along the way.

Needless to say, the painting process is not as fast as I had hoped it would be. Fortunately the editor and author are patient men.

One thing for sure: It’s a trip, and little by little the pages are coming to life.

Shown here are a few “excepts” cropped from the wide format originals as well as one reduced original to give a look at how the illustrations will appear in the graphic novel.

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Duncan Long creates book illustrations for a number of publishers including HarperCollins, PS Publishing, Pocket Books, Solomon Press, Fort Ross, Moonstone and many other publishers and self-publishing authors. See more of his book illustrations at: http://DuncanLong.com/art.html
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