The Book Cover Archive is a compendium of the best of cover design, organized in some really useful ways. It’s the work of designers Ben Pierratt and Eric Jacobsen, and they’ve clearly put a lot of thought into the project. Not only can you search by authors, illustrators, and publishers, but also by designers, who are often the unsung heroes of a book’s success. (Don’t let anyone ever tell you people don’t judge a book by it’s cover.)
Once upon a time, every illustrator worth his or her salt kept a morgue file. The term comes from newspapers (who in turn swiped it from the coroner’s office) and it refers to the collection of files of reference material and back issues usually stored in the basement.
An illustration morgue file is an accumulation of images, often clipped from magazines and old books, that illustrators used for reference when they needed to know how to draw something. Morgue files were often accumulated over the course of a career, and they were messy and difficult to organize.
Nowadays, there’s little need to keep a traditional morgue file; the internet provides a much larger inventory than any individual collector could hope to amass. Listed below are some of the places I might go if I needed to draw, say, a horned lizard riding an old fashioned bicycle:
James Gurney is the author/illustrator of the Dinotopia series. He draws and paints like a son of a gun. His rough sketches make my finished pieces look like dog barf. Plus, I met him at a book signing last year and he’s really nice. His blog is a phenomenal reference for all things illustrated. You should probably be reading it right now instead of this.
Irene Galo, an art director at Tor Books, has posted a good, common sense primer on putting together a portfolio. It covers tips on content, knowing your audience, your competition, and even minding your manners. Excellent advice, and a definite bookmark for all illustrators.
Recently, I was talking to my illustration students about what it was like back in the dark ages, before Photoshop and Illustrator ruled our world. One of my students asked how they managed to do the all the stuff they did before they had computers. I could think of no better example than this video, a making-of featurette on the “new” HBO TV intro from 1983.
