Book Cover Illustrations

When writing my previous post about Dieselpunk artwork, I forgot the artwork I did about a year ago for Stephen Quayle’s Empire Beneath the Ice. These illustrations arguably fall into the Dieselpunk spectrum (in this case, uniting Nazi weapons, uniforms, and such with the German work on perfecting flying saucers at the end of World […]

For many years, magazines and books used black and white or grayscale illustrations in their text. This cut the printing costs since only one ink was being used, while still supplying some visual interest, as well as capturing buyers who leafed through the publication at a newsstand. Over the years, these illustrations pretty much vanished […]

I’m no lawyer. But I have signed at least a thousand publishing contracts of one sort or another over the decades I’ve been working in the publishing business. And during that time I’ve dodged a few potential pitfalls that writers and artists can face in contracts. (Up front, let me say that before you sign […]

One of the more troubling and often horrifying inventions of story telling occurs when something we’ve come to expect to be good turns out to be bad. These quickly transform the things of everyday life into the monsters from the dark corners of the mind. Invasion of the Body Snatchers as well as many movies […]

Here’s a nice interview with my favorite book cover illustrator (me, of course): Portrait of a Book Illustrator: Duncan Long Arguably I’m a bit wordy… Sue Bursztynski only asked four questions, and I spun out the answers to the point that it formed her entire column. Of course you can see more of my book […]

Have just added the finishing touches on the cover illustration for the third book in Paul B. Thompson’s Brightstone Saga being marketed by Enslow Publishers. The process was a tad convoluted (and I’ll not bombard viewers with the many variations produced). We had a series of ideas. Originally the concept was to have a werewolf […]

Over the last few months, I’ve been creating more “terrorist” covers and recently terrorists with nuclear devices. Arguably this is the ultimate nightmare of our age, only exceeded in the destructive potential of an all-out nuclear exchange or our planet being struck by a large asteroid. I suppose part of the fiction writer’s job is […]

I recently received a box which, after determining that it wasn’t ticking (yes, I have crossed a few art directors in my time), I discovered contained all three mammoth volumes of Lawrence P. White’s Spirit of Empire trilogy. And, yes, the author had kindly signed each one. And it goes without saying that I’m pretty […]

This week we finished the cover for best-selling author John Phillip Backus’ The Sisterhood: After the Fall, Book Three. The novel is a post-apocalyptic science fiction series. For our starting point with this book cover illustration, John selected one of the digital paintings in my online gallery “Virtual Friends.” . As the project progressed, much […]

I recently completed the cover artwork for Anthony DeCosmo’s action-adventure/techno-thriller The God Particle which is the first in his “Opposing Force” series. The key requirement for the cover was that the environment look like a new lab with a biological containment door. After doing a little research on what a bio-containment door should look like […]