Starbright Illustrations (blog)

Digital painting illustrations for classic out-of-copyright books.

I was surfing the Internet looking for outlets for the artistic talent on display at Starbright illustrations, and as I was clicking around I found the websites of a few mainstream illustration agents, such as The Artworks here, and I noticed an interesting thing. These mainstream sites didn’t feature a lot of illustrations of robots, spaceships or monsters. It seems that if I am going to interest illustration agents in representing my work I’m going to have to include some more mainstream subject matter.

A subject that did seem to turn up repeatedly in the portfolios of the artists that are represented is book covers. I saw illustrations for a few modern interesting books and I thought why don’t I include book cover art in my portfolio?

It seems like a really good idea, but there is a problem, I’ve never actually been commissioned to produce cover art for a book.

But then of course I came up with the solution, if I hadn’t I’d hardly be writing this post. I’ve often raided the fantastic Gutenburg site for free ebooks to read, and these books could also be a very useful source of inspiration for my illustrations. Producing art for the covers of classics by the great authors of the English language would be a pleasure and it would also go a long way to diversifying my portfolio and making it more accessible to the non nerdy comic book fan. As you can see from the sketch accompanying this post my first project will be Moby-Dick, and I’ll be posting my progress as usual while the illustration evolves and gradually moves towards completion.