Book Cover Illustrations

On weekends I sometimes paint a “just for fun” piece that hopefully will be sold down the road. Here’s one of these, this one with a science fiction flavor with a nod toward the Garden of Eden. I’ve titled this illustration “Eve at Empire’s End.” ===================== Duncan Long loves to create book illustrations and even […]

I received an autographed copy of Dora Machado’s Stonewiser III: The Lament of the Stone, now available from Mermaid Press. This is the third book in the series (and I also had the honor of creating the book cover illustrations for those as well). The first two books garnered several publishing awards, and I suspect […]

Here’s the final book cover layout for R. Thomas Roe’s upcoming action-adventure novel Searching for America. (You can check my previous two blog posts for more about the book cover illustration.) I added an AK-47 icon for the spine and basically to fill space in the layout above the book publisher’s address. (And, yes, fellow […]

The growing number of self-published authors and small presses has been fretted over by many in the publishing industry. Their fear/argument has been that in the past big publishers acted as gatekeepers to preserve the quality of books. They rejected poorly written work and maintained the quality of books being produced — so the argument […]

Received this photo of a jolly John Chadwell standing in front of the book cover and graphic novel cover I created for him. And, yes, that’s his Facebook page showing there on the monitor at the lower right. John has a lot to smile about. His scripts for both stories are now making the rounds […]

One of this week’s projects, the cover illustration and design for Linda Franklin’s Rainbow in the Flames, a true story of tragedy turned into triumph through the love and perseverance. The tricky part of this cover proved to be arranging the rainbow so it would cross the spine, show on the front in the proper […]

Here’s the finished book cover illustration and layout for R.S. Guthrie’s novel Black Beast. This project allowed the creation of another “contrasts” illustration involving a priest (different novels, but both central characters are Roman Catholic priests). In this case the evil is pretty apparent, and obviously provides the main contrast to the priest who’s unaware […]

The Kindle version of Hunt of the Sea Wolves is now available at: Amazon.com. Interestingly, the original color version becomes grayscale — because the Kindle is currently color blind. I expect that to change in the near future, but for now, a book illustrator must take a little care to keep the cover illustration contrasts […]

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 […]

This is another book illustration I had the opportunity to have showcased in the upcoming May issue of Horror Bound Magazine. In this case, science fiction book cover artwork I created for my own novel Wrong Side In. This picture has had it’s own tale of woe. Several years ago, I wrote a science fiction […]