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 […]

I enjoyed a nice interview at Artsy Shark. The site has some fantastic information for illustrators as well as those interested in book publishing as well as the process of book illustration. Now to get over my inflated head. ==================== When not being interviewed, Duncan Long works as a freelance book illustrator. He has done […]

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 […]

I have no complaint about the vast majority of my clients — with perhaps three exceptions over a decade or so. And these few bad eggs had song-and-dance routines shown in this video (below). For the rest of my customers (past and future), I hope you can enjoy a few laughs. For my fellow illustrators, […]

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 […]

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 […]

Two nice things about digital illustrations are that the artwork can be stored easily, and that it can also be reworked very easily. For someone who’s going through a decade-long “learning curve” (like — uh, ME!) this makes it possible to go back to concepts that were good, but not executed too well, and revise […]

This is the concept art I did to create the background for my Tree Clan illustration. Actually, it’s two or three sketches combines… First, I got the sky figured out, then a separate layer forming the tree-like structures and bridges, another for the small figures standing on the structure (useful for giving it some “scale” […]