Book Cover Illustrations

Today’s project was finalizing the artwork for John Chadwell’s Hunt of the Sea Wolves which will go into print first as a Kindle title and from there… Well, the sky’s the limit because Diverse Talent Group is currently soliciting producers. John Chadwell has written hundreds of articles for magazines and newspapers, is a successful script […]

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 […]

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 […]

Although I used to work in oil paints and pen and ink, today my illustrations (like the one above for George Blackburne’s The Reverse Multiplier Effect) are all digital, painted by pushing electrons across the screen with a Wacom digital tablet and pen. The sizes of the paintings I create for book covers are generally […]

A character sketch created for the book cover I’m working on for Suzy Dingle’s YA novel Shamazan. We needed a “girl next door” look – and hopefully this works for that. The book cover itself is proving challenging due to the variety of light/dark areas, including a glowing liquid. Getting everything to work is a […]

Some in the art community fear that Washington DC politicians may cut funding to the arts (NEA, etc.) in an effort to get the budget in check. My take? Please make the cuts. Right to the bone. Every April 14th I send the IRS a big chunk of my earnings. Probably you do, too. I […]

A book cover illustration and layout that I’ve been working on over the last couple of weeks for Dr. David Gelber’s non-fiction book Behind the Mask. The colors in the illustration were a little tricky since normally hospital surgeries are well lit in spotless white environments — which dictated either boxing a whitish picture in […]

Dr. Shelley Carson has been researching creativity for some years now, and we often exchange emails. She recently asked me to write a small comment on how some of my artwork had influenced me on a personal level — and this is the result. The artwork is the illustration I created for Dale Allan’s novel […]

This is a very old illustration I did years back – which recently caught the eye of a fan (and so the posting on the off chance that others might enjoy it). It’s titled “Works Without Faith” — a sort of twist of the Bible quote about “faith without works.” I figured that idea was […]