Book Cover Illustrations

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. […]

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 […]

Dr. David Gelber sent word that his book Behind the Mask: The Mystique of Surgery and the Surgeons Who Perform Them is now available at Amazon.com. Normally operating rooms are brightly light, so things were a little tricky with this cover because the central figure tended to get lost in the background. Finally I hit […]

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 […]

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 […]

Several months ago I had the privilege of creating the cover for A. J. Vega’s Majesty’s Offspring. I’m happy to announce that the book has a home page now. The site is nicely done and the Prologue to the book is also available online for those wanting a sneak peek at what’s inside the covers. […]