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It’s a curious feeling when a drawing which is nearly 26 years old makes it out into the world. The image above is the cover of a new 7″ single release, Dominion of Avyaktam by metal band Orator, the picture being something I drew in 1984 entitled Mahakala after the Tibetan deity which it depicts. [...]

Cathartes.
Paintings from this gallery of portraits and still lifes. I suspect Jeff VanderMeer would appreciate the Manfungus series. Via Chateau Thombeau.

Manfungus 1.4.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The fantastic art archive

Pages from Physica Curiosa (1697) by Gaspar Schott, a collection of natural anomalies and the usual debatable creatures which belong in a fantastic bestiary. Some of these are similar to illustrations from the same period which I’ve used in Ann & Jeff VanderMeer’s Kosher Guide to Imaginary Animals, due for publication soon by Tachyon.

Elsewhere on [...]

The final post of an exceptionally productive year arrives with 2010 already shaping up to be just as busy and stimulating work-wise. In 2009 I designed at least 12 books (or was it 13? I’ve lost count…), 8 or 9 book covers, several CDs and many one-off commissions, as well as producing that calendar. If [...]

I won’t say this is by popular demand but after persistent requests for posters of my cover art for Jeff VanderMeer’s latest novel, Finch, I’ve opened a new CafePress shop selling exactly that. The largest of these is 58.38cm x 82.55 (22.984″ x 32.5″) which should be big enough for most appetites. There’s also a [...]

Yet another of the titles I’ve been working on this year—yes, it’s been a very busy time—Booklife took several months of back and forth on the part of author, editor and designer before we had something that everyone was happy with.
Offering timely advice in an era when the burden of production and publicity frequently falls [...]

Continuing a rather psychedelic week, Eyecandy is another of those groovy web toys, this time putting you inside a kaleidoscopic sphere of coloured circles whose parameters you can change with sliding controls. Fun to mess with when the right music is playing.
And while we’re on the subject, my new calendar has been selling very well [...]

Steampunk: Life in Our New Century!
I’m behind on work updates again. Still being very productive on a range of different fronts—mostly book and CD design as usual—but the workload means that site updates tend to suffer. Anyway…
This new Steampunk illustration was a quick piece done at the weekend to accompany an article Jeff VanderMeer is [...]

Shared Worlds is a fantasy writing-oriented summer camp for teenagers created by Jeremy Jones and Jeff VanderMeer, and hosted at Wofford College, South Carolina. Jeff asked me to design a small booklet to be printed at the end of this year’s activities as a means of showcasing examples of the writings produced during the various [...]

The first of the books I’ve been designing for Tachyon Publications appears this month. Two more are due to follow and I’m working on another at the moment; more about those titles later.
The Best of Michael Moorcock was a pleasure to be involved with not only because I’ve been reading Moorcock’s fiction for a very [...]

Panther Books paperback edition, 1968; cover painting: The Eye of Silence by Max Ernst.
If I can’t remember when I first encountered JG Ballard’s work, it’s not because I was reading him at a very early age, more that a childhood enthusiasm for science fiction made his books as omnipresent in my early life as any [...]

The Steampunk design I created last year for Modofly (based on a formula by writer Jeff VanderMeer) is given a new lease of life with this colour version. Modofly produce decorated Moleskin books with a range of designs from some very talented artists. Previous graphics were laser-etched onto the boards but they’re now able to [...]

I created a cover design recently for Jeff VanderMeer’s new novel, Finch, and shortly after completing that Jeff asked if I could put together some cover ideas for his forthcoming writer’s guide, Booklife, which Tachyon will be publishing later this year. Jeff is known as a fantasy writer but this book was intended to have [...]

A new book cover design which I’m posting slightly ahead of time—it still needs a suitable blurb adding—since Jeff VanderMeer was eager to show it to his readers. You can see it bigger size here.
Finch is the third book in Jeff’s cycle of unique fantasy novels and stories about the city of Ambergris. This book [...]

Arthur #32 is now out with a great cover. As usual you can download it from the Arthur site. Unfortunately that’s the only way you’ll be able to get hold of this issue since the paper copy won’t be printing. Arthur still needs your support, however, via subscriptions, donations and/or advertising if you haven’t wasted [...]

Time again for some work updates and other news. I mentioned in August that this Steampunk design—created to illustrate a formula definition of the genre by Jeff VanderMeer—was originally going to be a T-shirt. That idea fell by the wayside when an opportunity arose to submit it to Modofly who were asking for Steampunk-related work [...]

Thomas Paul’s melamine plates parallel Laura Zindel’s ceramics in their borrowing of natural history engravings. Anything which brings tentacles into home furnishing gets a vote here and the octopus design at the top right can also be found on Paul’s cushion designs. Jeff VanderMeer would probably bemoan the absence of the squid but I took [...]

Arriving in the post today was Steps of Descent, the new CD from American band Cyaegha featuring my design and illustration. The name Cyäegha (sic) belongs originally to a Cthulhu Mythos entity invented by Eddie C Bertin, author of The Whispering Horror, my favourite story from the Pan Book of Horror anthologies of the Seventies. [...]

So it arrived at last, yesterday in fact, the colossal volume that is A Lovecraft Retrospective: Artists Inspired by HP Lovecraft from Centipede Press. Calling this a book is like calling the Great Pyramid of Cheops a pile of stones, technically accurate but the words somewhat fail to convey the existential reality. This is the [...]

From the Hollywood Gothic series (1984).
Jeff VanderMeer has a great post about artist/illustrator Ian Miller at io9 which prompts me to write a few words about his work myself, something I’ve intended for a while.
Miller is indelibly linked for me with HP Lovecraft on account of his covers for the Panther Horror editions of the [...]