Book Cover Illustrations

This is the preliminary cover illustration I’ve created for Dale Allan’s upcoming mystery novel Lead Me Not Into Temptation. We tried to capture the conflict in one of the key scenes in the book, in which a priest is faced with the moral dilemma of whether to take matters into his own hands, and perhaps […]

OK… these have to bring the total cover concepts I’ve created for the graphic novel Werewolves of New Idria (written by John Chadwell and soon to be released by Moonstone Books) up to something like eight different versions. The good news is that they seem to be getting better along the way. And each rejected […]

Choosing the right typeface (aka “font”) for a book cover or other publication is not as easy as it may seem. Part of the problem is the huge wealth of choices most of us have today. Back just a few decades ago, a designer might have access to a dozen typefaces on a good day. […]

Here’s the final version of the book cover for Douglas E. Richards‘ The Devil’s Sword. Since the illustration didn’t have a sword on it (even though fencing plays a big role in the storyline), I created a vector graphic of a classic fencing foil and then “impaled” the O and D in the “sword” part […]

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. […]

Second opinions can be good. They can also be disastrous. When it comes to second opinions, sometimes an illustrator’s clients can be the client’s own worse enemies. That’s the reason I always shudder when I hear a client start a statement with, “I asked my [son, secretary, neighbor] what they thought about the book illustration […]

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 […]

Sneak preview of the cover I completed this week for R. Thomas Roe’s Palm Beach Gold. ===================== Duncan Long is a freelance book cover illustrator and layout artist for HarperCollins, PS Publishing, Pocket Books, Solomon Press, Fort Ross, and many other publishers and self-publishing authors. See his cover illustrations at: http://DuncanLong.com/art.html =====================

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. =============== […]

Book cover illustration and cover design/layout for Dr. David Gelber’s soon-to-be-released Joshua and Aaron (Book Two in the series). In creating this cover, our first thrust was to offer a view of a human card player and only death’s hand and cards showing. Logically this made the most sense since readers tend to identify with […]