NIGHT GALLERY #1

From top to bottom: "One Mad Afternoon", "You Are Dreaming", "The Doll Maker's Daughter"...

DELPHINE 4 - Sneak Preview 6

CAT BURGLAR BLACK Preview 2: Aunt Vivian!

Judy Drood and Friends

At one point there was talk about an animated project featuring Judy Drood and other characters from Mad Night. I even did some production art to help those interested visualize it. Above are a couple of examples... Judy Drood, Girl Detective and her cartoon pals! (Might have been a bit dark for Saturday mornings -- but who knows!?)

Vampires!

From the archives: two different versions of the cover art for my modest 2003 vampire novella, Peculia And The Groon Grove Vampires. The first version was misguided, really. I wanted to do kind of an amoeba-shaped portal through which you could see a scene from the story. Well, it looked good as a sketch anyway! The real mistake was doing such a hard-edged shape (which is not the best solution with watercolor, which favors softer edges) and then

making the background a solid black. I often get inspired by cool hard-edged designs on book covers and subsequently make an attempt to duplicate it with watercolor. In never works... And what made it worse was that now the "view" through the portal needed to be lighter, to stand out from the black. So -- that's right, I made it a daytime scene. I have vampires strolling along during daytime. Oops...

Even though I kind of dashed off the second version, it still made a better cover than the first. Neither one has much to do with any actual scene from the story. I just wanted kind of dynamic image to convey a certain mood. I don't know. Like many of my paintings, I wish I had just one more shot to make it better. But you have to let go of these things once they're out there in the world...

Here is a scene from the book...

DELPHINE 4 - Sneak Preview 5

Gallery Ghost

A couple of years ago I got an assignment to do the cover ( as well as dozens of interior drawings) for an oversize hardcover book for kids called "Gallery Ghost". The story (actually a clever game) involves the ghosts of artists whose work is in the National Gallery (where the story takes place) coming out at night and adding little details to each other's work. An art student who works the night shift cleaning up the gallery discovers these paranormal hi-jinks and the ghosts allow her to participate in the fun. Anyway -- after the usual round of thumbnails, a cover idea was chosen and a full-size sketch was made.

At the same time I had also done a sketch for a border that was going to go on the title page.

A suggestion was made that perhaps the border could be used on the cover instead, so I did a mock-up to see how that would look.

Luckily everyone agreed it was way too busy. (The border didn't even end up in the final version of the book.) So we went back to the more simple cover illustration. I did the final and the designer added type, as well as the images of actual paintings.