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 […]

I was a bit perplexed yesterday when I stumbled upon a new “answer” site called ChaCha that attempts to answer questions put to it (I’d been searching for info about a client and was searching with my name as part of the search parameters, and ended at this page). Here’s the question posed to the […]

Here are a few articles that may be of help to those wanting to self-publish their books: Do you want to self-publish or go with a vanity press — and what are the differences? Self-Publishing & Vanity Publishing: Confuse Them and Pay the Price Type Size and Leading, White Space and Page Color Book Design […]

As noted in last week’s blog, I wrapped up the illustrations I created for the 2013 US Collaborative Summer Library Program (CSLP). In last week’s post, I showed the work that went into the poster. But there was a bit of other artwork for the project including spot art (for t-shirts, coffee mugs, and other […]

One of the pictures (which I posted for Halloween in the previous blog entry) caught the eye of designer David Grasekamp who asked to use it as “Mephisto” in newsletter advertising an upcoming lecture/exhibition about form in art — and which would include a showing of the 1926 German movie “Faust – Eine deutsche Volkssage.” […]

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 […]

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 […]

One of last week’s projects consisted of a re-working of the cover of Lawrence P. White’s novel. The new book is actually two books combined into one, giving readers a two-fer when they buy it. The original title (now the first half of the new book) was Spirit of Empire. That became the subtitle with […]

I was conversing with a fellow graphic designer recently and mentioned how today we enjoyed the many benefits of DTP (desktop publishing). The designer was somewhat taken aback (with good reason – as noted below). And I realized that the term DTP is almost never used any more, having slowly vanished from the lexicon of […]

Second opinions can be good. They can also be disastrous. When it comes to second opinions, sometimes an illustrator’s clients can be the client’s own worse enemies. That’s the reason I always shudder when I hear a client start a statement with, “I asked my [son, secretary, neighbor] what they thought about the book illustration […]