Book Cover Illustrations

Questions: How on earth do you get the intricacy of detail in your artwork? I understand how you could manage it with a fine brush or in pen-and-ink but how do you manipulate lines and curves? How do you get the gradations of color? I’m astonished, impressed, and intrigued simultaneously. Answers: All my illustrations are […]

I received an email from James Day saying that some of my book cover artwork and magazine illustrations would be appearing at his Art of Day site. Day’s pages have turned into a promotional website for artists and illustrators with gallery owners (often checking it to discovered talented new artists to exhibit), as well as […]

Over the weekend I had a short discussion with a friend about how very often a movie, article, or book can be improved by lopping off the first few paragraphs, pages, or minutes of film (depending on the medium). This is an old trick professional editors often employ to jump start an otherwise worthy creation. […]

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 […]

This is the polished book cover illustration for R. Thomas Roe’s action-adventure novel Searching for America. We’re rounding up the text for the back cover and its pretty much laid out (being proofed as I type this). Will post the front/spine/back cover when it is finalized… Readers can find more of my cover illustrations for […]

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 […]

Part of yesterday’s work: A Character Concept Drawing for R.S. Guthrie’s upcoming novel Black Beast. It is still a tad cartoonish so it doesn’t blend into the realism of the rest of the cover illustration. Of course hopefully there will never be/never has been a creature like this. So making it “real” gets a little […]

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 […]

I’ve been using TinEye the last few days to discover folks using my artwork online without permission. This is a handy little search engine that compares similarities between pictures. If I find sites using my work without permission, I then write a take-down notice, ask the user to credit me for the artwork, or whatever […]