Worldbuilders Charity Auction
I’ve donated some items to author Patrick Rothfuss’s Worldbuilders charity auction which strives to help people raise themselves up out of poverty and starvation and promote education, sustainable agriculture, and local industry all around the world.
You can see all the items that have been donated, which you can bid for in an ebay auction, over at Patrick’s blog. I’ve donated a couple of A3 prints: The Devil’s Tune (artwork for Horns by Joe Hill) and Thackery Lane (cover art for The Grin of the Dark by Ramsey Campbell) as well as one of the limited edition The Damnation Game Sterling Silver Bookmarks. The items that I’ve donated are listed here and you can bid on them as well as the other items at this link.
The Providence Rider
Apologies for the lack of posts these past few weeks; I’ve been pretty snowed under with work but am hoping to get back to more regular postings. To start things off, here’s some artwork for Robert McCammon’s The Providence Rider (the follow-up to Mister Slaughter), which I wrapped up work on at the end of last year. As with Mister Slaughter, I did a number of B&W interiors, but for this one I also provided colour endpaper art (which you can see below) and two colour interiors, one to go with the new story, Death Comes for the Rich Man (another Matthew Corbett adventre), that accompanies this volume. This is scheduled to be published in May from Subterranean Press. I’ll post more interior art for this when I can.
New Website: This Is Horror
This is Horror is a new website that’s just launched, aiming to spread awareness of horror in all its guises as a serious art form. It is the amalgamation of two previous websites, Read Horror and See Horror, to provide a complete horror experience. On the site you’ll find numerous columns, interviews and features covering horror fiction, film and video games. There are also various competitions with great prizes. At the moment there are two competitions running: Win a lifetime subscription to Spectral Press and Win Horror Genre Prizes.
If some of the imagery on the site looks familiar to any of you who follow my work, it’s because they’ve used some of my artwork throughout the site including my Danse Macabre image as the background artwork.
Interview with Ultimate Adventure Magazine
You can read a short interview I did for issue 1 of Ultimate Adventure Magazine online here. The magazine can also be downloaded for free in PDF, EPUB AND MOBI formats from their website.
The magazine is the brainchild of Andy Remic, SSF author and co-owner of Anarchy Books. Below is the official press release for Ultimate Adventure Magazine.
ULTIMATE ADVENTURE MAGAZINE
BIKING | CLIMBING | HIKING | TRAVEL | CAMPING | ADVENTURE
Issue #1 – Jan/Feb 2012
In this first bumper-packed 190 PAGE 60,000 WORD issue, we have an interview with CLAUDIO VON PLANTA, famous for filming Long Way Round and Long Way Down with EWAN MCGREGOR and CHARLIE BOORMAN, where he talks about his adventures behind the camera in places like Afghanistan and Africa, and tracking down Osama Bin Laden…
We have interviews with best-selling horror novelist GUY N. SMITH, New Zealand rock-singer and recent Glastonbury performer JORDAN REYNE, ultra-marathon runner ANDREW MURRAY and top SFF artist VINCENT CHONG.
We have features on climbing in Scotland, crossing Australia on a postie’s moped, cycling in the Akamas mountains in Cyprus, making a short horror medical zombie film, and heading to Mexico in search of buried secrets.
All this, along with news, letters, competitions, the ANTI-CLARKSON column, Whackjob Jim Column and The Horror, The Horror Column, reviews of kit, motorbikes, caravans, restaurants, books, video games, albums and sports fuel, short fiction by Garry Charles, a serialised graphic novel by Martyn Pick, your favourite Grumpy Old Man — and Ultimate Kids Adventure, something for the kids (and their parents!) to do at weekends.
Happy Holidays!
Hope you all have a wonderful Christmas with your friends and family and wishing you all the very best for 2012!
Living with the Dead
Above is my wraparound cover art for Living with the Dead, a collection of stories by Martin Livings, to be released in 2012 by Dark Prints Press, a new Australian independent publisher established this year.
I collaborated with Martin on the idea for the cover. We both thought that the best approach for this would be to come up with an image that played with the title, as it’s quite an evocative phrase in itself, rather than base the art on imagery from any particular stories. So even though there is a story entitled Living with the Dead in the collection, the image isn’t a response to that particular story as such.
The idea of people with ‘skull heads’ came from Martin. Years before, he’d been toying with cover ideas for this collection and threw together a quick mock-up where he took a vintage family photo and replaced everyone’s heads with skulls. I thought this idea would work for the cover and used it as a starting point to develop the composition. I liked the idea of having the woman appearing ‘alive’; Martin suggested that it should be the man so I came up with another sketch showing that, but in the end we went back to having the woman alive and both agreed that that seemed to work best. Initially I just had a house on the left hand side, and it was Martin’s suggestion to change it to a church and add two gravestones next to it which I think adds a nice touch. Martin has also posted some comments about the cover art process on his blog which you can read here.
You can find out more information about Living with the Dead here.
Limited Edition Sterling Silver The Damnation Game Bookmark
A limited edition sterling silver bookmark, based on the artwork I created for the Polish edition of Clive Barker’s The Damnation Game, is now available for purchase. This piece was created in collaboration with Keith Brunkard and master goldsmith Doug Hazel, who is the founder of The Oghamzone arts and crafts website.
The bookmark is limited to 150 and comes in a display case as seen above. Numbers 1-52 will be accompanied by a special limited edition signed ‘playing card’ and numbers 53-150 will come with a small signed card as seen below.
The prices for the bookmark, which includes postage and packaging, are as follows:
Numbers 1-52 – €225 euros (approx. £190)
Numbers 53-150 – €212 euros (approx £175)
Purchases can be made through The Oghamzone website on the product page here. Please allow 28 days for delivery.
*Please note that I’m not handling any sales directly myself, so if you would like to purchase the bookmark, it is currently only available through The Oghamzone website.
The Oghamzone also has other jewellery, art, ceramics and fashion accessories by various artists available, including a collection by Doug himself, so be sure to check it all out. Doug’s designs are also available from The National Museum of Ireland, The Kilkenny Group and Trinity College Library Shop, Dublin as part of the Declan Killen Design Studio collection.
BFS Journal Winter 2011/2012
The British Fantasy Society has used my Snow Globe image for the cover of their winter 2011/2012 issue of the BFS Journal.
The Windup Girl Covers
Here’s my two covers for the Subterranean Press edition of The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi. The one on the left is for the limited edition and the one on the right the deluxe limited edition.
The author had the idea of making it look like an old beaten travel volume, or a volume of flora and fauna like those from 19th century explorers, but to modernize it somehow so that it would have the look of something that was old but also science fictional, in a similar way to how the story feels both futuristic and historical.
So I applied this concept to the cover design, making them appear like weathered and battered covers to old volumes and added some graphical and diagrammatic elements to give the design a more modern feel. I also continued this idea throughout the interior illustrations (which I’ll try to post at a later date) so that each one, rather than being a single illustration, looks like a page from a field guide, with illustrations, drawings, ‘photos’ and annotations, etc. to do with various things from the novel. It was a fun challenge to be able to take this different approach to the overall design of the covers and interiors rather than illustrating the story in a more straightforward manner.
