Next week I’ll move on to posting some other kinds of things, but I wanted to show a couple more of these…mostly because I had so much fun doing them! The challenge of this one was that the premise was very similar to a picture from the previous book and I wanted to be sure to make them distinct from each other. So, I simply reversed the camera angle which also cut down on the amount of detail I had to put in. The detail, of course, is where the fun is but it is also where I’d go broke if I don’t restrain myself. The budget for these books is not great and if I were to spend more than a full day on any of these pictures my rate of pay would go from modest to miserable. Anyway…enough griping. Here’s the image along with the one from the previous book for comparison:

In looking back at the illustrations for the previous books I felt that I had a tendency to create claustrophobic spaces. I think I’ve always had this inclination, in all the various styles and applications of my artwork, to both fill up all the space with stuff and also to not vary the tonal range as much as I could, resulting in a flattening of space despite my best attempts at dynamic perspective in my compositions. I really had to force myself to keep the background of this image as light as it ended up. The compulsion to darken the outlines was nearly impossible to resist but I’m really glad I did. Can I do this more often in the future? I hope so.

Elliot enters a cave to find that all the underworld creatures have been frozen…

The challenge with this one was to create multiple levels of space for depth and also to have all the creatures appear frozen without the poses and composition looking stiff. I fussed with the lighting and the opacity of the linework on the various layers endlessly.

A spot illo of Fidget and Hagatha:

In the final installment of the Underworld Trilogy by Jennifer Nielsen, Elliot joins forces with all the underworld creatures to battle Kovol the demon once and for all. I’m working on the interiors now, but the cover is done…and here it is:

Here’s the final sneak from book II in the Elliot series:

Boy, I had fun with this one!

Here’s a detail:

Here is the second sneak at the second book in  Jennifer Nielsen’s Elliot series. This one features the same demon that features prominently on the cover. For this picture I took some inspiration from some of my favorite old sci-fi and sword & sorcery illustrators and cartoonists, such as Frazetta and Wally Wood.  I lost some of the motion and drama that was in my first sketch (which I’ll post tomorrow), but it still looks pretty good I think.

The second book in the Jennifer Nielsen’s series of books about Elliot, an awkward but intrepid young boy who finds himself in the middle of some wild Elf-Goblin-Brownie-Demon conflicts, will be released soon. I just finished up the interior illustrations and I’m looking forward to working on book three. Once a week I’ll post a selected image from the interior illustrations, up until publication. This is one of my favorites, depicting Elliot forced into a fight-to-the-death with his old nemesis,  a goblin named Grissel. The crazed and rabid audience of howling goblins was fun to draw. See if you can spot the tea party references in the crowd.