Civil War isn't just a Guns & Roses Song... Who knew?

This is the cover illustration for the 5th book in the Virginia historical fiction series I've been working on. Yes, once again I am posting something I did for work but my next one will be something of my own... I promise... no seriously, I will. I can't promise it will be up before Christmas though.

Engineering Collage

I finally got to take a break from the novels at work and I went back to illustrating stuff for our other publications. It was nice to branch out a bit and conceptualize something a bit more design oriented. Unfortunately, it got me off of my routine and I spent a horribly disproportionate amount of time on this one at the expense of everything else that needed to get done.

Completed Cover

I know this is a big jump from 'Step 2' to the finished product but between the stress of meeting the deadline and the random progression of my work I opted not to try and show any more steps. At first I was roughing in the colors and directional lighting for the figures but then got distracted by the sky which I finished perfectly before going back to work on the figures. At that point, I finished the guys in the background then finished the ground and trench wall behind them. Finally after everything else looked about done, I finished the main character in the foreground. This isn't really representative of the way I work it just happened to be the way this one developed. Anyway, here is the final piece and I feel good about how it turned out.

Step 2

After the drawing is done I usually like to start by laying down some flat under-paintings for each layer of the illustration.

Revolutionary Drawing

I mean that literally. This is a drawing of a scene from a book about the American Revolution. It's the next cover for another historical fiction I am doing for work. And although the old man (my last post) was supposed to show my work in progress, it is still in progress (meaning I haven't touched it since I posted it). So in the meantime, here is another work in progress. I'll post the finished version of both of them when they are done. If nothing else it shows two different approaches to an illustration.

An Old Man in Progress

It has been a while since I last posted anything and it has been a really long time since I posted something that wasn’t work related. It feels good to finally be doing some work of my own again. I’ve been teaching private art lessons and right now we are working on portraits so I thought I would give one a whirl. Also, I have yet to show the progression of any of my work so I thought I would post this one now in its early stages and then I’ll post it again when it’s finished.