Book Cover Illustrations

You’ve got a great book idea. You’ve got your manuscript finished and polished (and if it isn’t near perfect, stop reading now and come back when your manuscript is as close to flawless as is humanly possible for you to make it). Now what? How do you get that manuscript into print? Right at the […]

It isn’t rare to read a book and discover that the cover illustration didn’t have much to do with the story. One reason for this is that with many publishers cutting back with their budgets, cover artwork often suffers either in how well it is done (you do get what you pay for) or in […]

I’m currently working on a book cover illustration for author James Johnson. There are some real challenges in this since the light for the returning Christ needs to be ultra-bright — yet we still need to be able to see details in his face and figure as well as hints of a Heavenly army behind […]

I keep seeing this suggestion that with technology, all change is good, that new is always better. Perhaps slow-to-adopt-new-technology folks simply have a sense of history. They’ve perhaps read about (or experienced) changes that were technological dead ends: Eight tracks, Betamax, the latest Hi-Def standards… These new technologies arrive with glowing promises that often fail […]

One of the more important parts of being an illustrator is displaying your work (and hopefully enticing someone to buy it). When it comes to displaying artwork at web sites, things aren’t quite as clear cut as they might seem. Sadly there are many beautiful sites on the web that are plagued by problems that […]

Another “book cover illustration exercise” done last weekend for entertainment — and hopefully to either inspire the commission of a book cover illustration or even to serve as a book illustration should it match an author’s vision of a story in search of artwork. Or maybe some concept art or a character design. At any […]

A “just for fun” piece I did over the weekend; a good demo of concept art and/or a book cover illustration (and, yes, all rights are still available as I write this). Since the cloaked figure is supposed to be traveling (through deep space) incognito, I placed the figure on the left, causing it to […]

This is the original background concept art for the final Tree Clan painting (mentioned previously in this blog). Actually, this is several concept art paintings overlaid. The back layer is the “starscape” of major stars and stellar dust, another the trees and bridges, one of the small figures, another of the distant monolithic structures, and […]

Occasionally I see a writer agonize over which of two proposed book cover illustrations to place on his book. His fear is that one picture might be much better than the other for their title. And since there’s no way to know (short of trying both), it is a decision that’s hard to make. Or […]

“Rich Young Ruler” is another reworked “golden older” I did some years back. I know he doesn’t look young. But the intriguing thing about the story of the Rich Young Ruler (who rejected salvation to keep his riches) is that eventually, barring accident or other early demise, he grew old. Did he die old and […]