I have a tendency to make every project more complicated than it needs to be. I think that’s why these re-imagined cover designs for classic science fiction books are so appealing. Each one was created by hand on a single sheet of white paper, then photographed. No fancy computer tricks, expensive software, or any of that jazz. These are stunning.
Let’s say you’re writing a comic, and you want to indicate that your character is out of breath and speaking French from the other side of a closed door. How do you do it?
Nate Piekos knows. Although most of us never give it a second thought, comics have an elaborate, established visual language for speech balloons and their contents. Nate understands this language, and he’s put together a terrific guide to all the variations. It’s a great read, even if you have no interest in ever making a comic for yourself. I guarantee you’ll be surprised at how many of the conventions you already recognize and understand fluently.
Artist Lou Romano has a wonderful post on the work that went into designing the characters and settings for Pixar’s new film, UP. It’s fascinating to see the amount of preparation that goes into a production like this, from conceptual art to sculptures of the key characters. Really inspirational, and well worth a look, even if you haven’t seen the movie.
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:
