Book Cover Illustrations

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 […]

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. […]

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 […]

Another of the B&W book illustrations I created for Victor Thorn’s upcoming book, Reality Bomb. The illustration is titled Forsake All Hope Ye Who Enter Here — with the phrase appearing in tiny print on one of the windows as well. ===================== Duncan Long is a freelance book illustrator who has done work for HarperCollins, […]

I recently sold “Nuked” for use as the cover on John Backus’ post-apocalyptic adventure novel Hunter – After the Fall. I created this illustration a long time ago, and it has always been a (somewhat chilling) favorite, perhaps reflecting the fears of those of us who grew up at the tail end of the Cold […]

One of Richard Thieme’s science fiction short stories “Northward into the Night” from Mind Games (published April 2010 under the Duncan Long Publications imprint) is now available for a “free read” at nycBigCityLit.com. The illustration (above) was been used in its black-and-white version to illustrate the story in the book. A color version graces the […]

I occasionally create a book cover mock-up to “fill in the spaces” in my online portfolio and galleries. This is one such recent book cover design, based on an illustration I create about a year ago while experimenting with a technique for creating a rough, painterly effect using historic figures as a starting point. =============== […]

An artist can sometimes be an arrogant [insert noun here] to work with. Some artists seem to think that the client should have little or nothing to say in what is being done with a illustration project. Of course it is true that an artist is hired for his skill and expertise (which the client […]

I’ve had the pleasure of creating the cover illustrations for the first two Stonewiser books (and am currently working on the third cover illustration). Written by Dora Machado, these books are technically fantasy novels, but have a bit more depth to them than is often seen with this genre. Machado’s extra work in crafting her […]