Book Cover Illustrations

Jenna Elizabeth Johnson regularly interviews book illustrators (and authors) at her blog. Here’s her interview of me. Thanks, Jenna! ==================== Duncan Long creates book covers artwork and cover illustrations for self-publishing authors and indie publishers as well as larger established presses like HarperCollins, PS Publishing, Moonstone Books, Pocket Books, and Enslow Publishers. You can see […]

There was a time when I drew my black and white artwork with pen and ink, working over pencil sketches that then were erased after the ink had dried. It was intensive, back-breaking work that often took all day just to produce two or three drawings. And in my youth I played with oil paints […]

I recently had a request from a friend to post one of my illustrations that I did for a children’s book Witches and Fish: A Parable of Dreams. The book was basically written for the child in me, with no real plans to ever market it in a serious way, in large part because while […]

Shakespeare’s Ophelia is one of the tragic figures in Hamlet. She’s scorned and ridiculed by Hamlet: Hamlet: …I did love you once. Ophelia: Indeed, my, lord, you made me believe so. Hamlet: You should not have believed me…I loved you not. Ophelia: I was the more deceived. Ophelia eventually crumbles under the unfolding tragedy around […]

Another three illustrations from the flying monkeys who fling electrons at the screen here at the Duncan Long Studio. As usual, these illustrations were pretty much created for my own enjoyment, though all three are spinoffs from ideas or materials for actual book cover projects (but which were never used). Hopefully they’ll eventually find homes […]

I’m slowly wrapping up what proved to be a huge book project: Illustrating and laying out Steve Quayle’s Angel Wars. Rather than creating only the cover illustration for the book (as is my normal assignment with book projects), I also did the graphic design and layout of the cover and all the inner pages as […]

The last few weeks I’ve been struggling with a book layout project that’s proved to be a lot of fun. The publisher has given me pretty much free rein: I’ve been free to choose/create a typeface family, devise the two-column layout, and pick the photos and illustrations to go into it. In short, it’s been […]

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 […]

One of last week’s projects consisted of a re-working of the cover of Lawrence P. White’s novel. The new book is actually two books combined into one, giving readers a two-fer when they buy it. The original title (now the first half of the new book) was Spirit of Empire. That became the subtitle with […]

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 […]