Book Cover Illustrations

From time to time, I get the chance to create a book cover illustration of a historic character. This gets a little tricky because often the “historic” pictures of them are another ancient artist’s notion of what the character looked like — often incorporating elements that are in fashion or vogue within the culture and […]

We’ve had a busy couple of weeks creating new cover illustrations for some of John Bowers’ science fiction “Starport” series. Above is the final illustration and layout of the updated cover for Occupy Eroak. As is often the case, I created several several versions of the illustration before we finally got to something that worked well. Perhaps […]

We recently completed the cover for Kenneth Fore’s action adventure novel The Wolf Tattoo. The Synopsis: A man’s impromptu journey into the Alaskan wilderness is life changing when he tangles with a grizzly and an Eskimo woman who thwarts his attempts to escape. She takes him on an unforgettable journey where they must fight wilderness […]

I got word today from Stuart Jaffe that his mystery novel Southern Bound is now available for purchase. You can read more about how we created the book cover illustration for this title at my previous blog: Cover Artwork for Stuart Jaffe’s New Mystery Novel. Offering hours of good reading, the book is a part […]

Many artists and writers are big fans of Carl Jung, in large part because he’s the champion of the hidden dark recesses of the human mind — places where many creative people find themselves in when working on plots, sketches, or other ideas. I’m one of those artists. So when I had a chance to […]

Here’s the cover illustration I created for Christina J. Adams’ new science fiction novel The White Lilac. The trick was to create a cover illustration that the viewer would perceive as a young woman in water — rather than a gal floating in the air or space. To achieve this, I worked with a variety […]

I recently had a request from a friend to post one of my illustrations that I did for a children’s book Witches and Fish: A Parable of Dreams. The book was basically written for the child in me, with no real plans to ever market it in a serious way, in large part because while […]

Shakespeare’s Ophelia is one of the tragic figures in Hamlet. She’s scorned and ridiculed by Hamlet: Hamlet: …I did love you once. Ophelia: Indeed, my, lord, you made me believe so. Hamlet: You should not have believed me…I loved you not. Ophelia: I was the more deceived. Ophelia eventually crumbles under the unfolding tragedy around […]

Another three illustrations from the flying monkeys who fling electrons at the screen here at the Duncan Long Studio. As usual, these illustrations were pretty much created for my own enjoyment, though all three are spinoffs from ideas or materials for actual book cover projects (but which were never used). Hopefully they’ll eventually find homes […]

I’m slowly wrapping up what proved to be a huge book project: Illustrating and laying out Steve Quayle’s Angel Wars. Rather than creating only the cover illustration for the book (as is my normal assignment with book projects), I also did the graphic design and layout of the cover and all the inner pages as […]