Bloomsbury Auction

On Wednesday, December 9, Bloomsbury Auction house will have a sale called "Capture the Imagination: Original Illustration and Fine Illustrated Books."

There will be one Dinotopia item in the sale, a rare first edition/first printing with an even more rare title page:


Bloomsbury "Capture the Imagination" Auction Catalog, Lot 279, p. 116.
Website Bloomsbury Auctions.com

Illo 2

Dan Zimmer is best known for the beautifully produced ILLUSTRATION magazine, which is about the history of American Illustration. He also publishes ILLO, a book-length spotlight on the contemporary illustration scene.



He has just released ILLO 2, which features interviews with Michael Cho, Nancy Stahl, and Zina Saunders. Somehow I got lucky and they included me, too.

It’s hard to convey how extensive the coverage is on each person without actually seeing the whole issue, so here's every page. Go to a newsstand and pick one up so that Mr. Zimmer can keep making future issues. There are a lot of other deserving illustrators that he still needs to cover.

ILLO main website, link.
Purchase ILLO 2 or subscribe directly from Dan Zimmer, link.

Bewick’s Tailpieces

One of Newcastle's best known artists is Thomas Bewick (1753-1828). He was a wood engraver and an early pioneer and innovator of book illustration.

One of Bewick's specialties was the tailpiece, a small spot illustration filling the empty space at the end of a chapter. The Laing Art Gallery has an exhibit of these works, which they call "tale-pieces" because many of them tell a witty story or teach a moral lesson.

This one, which is reality only about two inches across, shows an old woman chasing geese. This kind of ornamental design frequently was surrounded by leaves and foliage. For that reason they came to be known as a vignettes, from the French word "vigne" meaning "vine."
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The Laing Art Gallery exhibit will be shown through 18 October 2009.

Wikipedia on Thomas Bewick.

Digging Machine

This is an unused concept sketch for a paperback cover for the novel Digging Leviathan by James Blaylock. The story involved a kid building a homemade machine to dig down to Pellucidar under modern-day LA.

I love a science fiction premise that mixes the bizarre and the banal, and I relished the opportunity to include a Rambler, a Mobil sign, a fish flag, and a TV antenna.

We didn’t end up using that particular sketch, though, because it didn’t have quite enough immediate impact. Instead we used a design that put the machine more in silhouette.

Initial Caps

Here are a couple of the initial capital letters that I (Jim) designed for The Hand of Dinotopia by Alan Dean Foster, with whom I’m currently traveling in North Africa. Initial caps are an old fashioned device in book design. I used them to open up chapters with little pictures.

Mort Künstler in Illustration 24

The new Illustration Magazine features a special issue devoted to the work and career of Mort Künstler. The article by Stephen Doherty follows his career, ranging from paperbacks, pulps, adventure magazines, Aurora model kits, slicks, and his recent work illustrating events from the Civil War.
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On the Illustration Magazine website, you can preview every page in thumbnail form to get a sense of the scope of the coverage, link.
You can find the magazine soon at your local bookseller or order it from Bud's Art Books, link.

Skeleton Pirate

A new edition of a classic fantasy horror novel by Tim Powers called “On Stranger Tides” is now available through the Dinotopia Store.

In this post I’ll tell you a little about how I did the painting. I originally bought this skeleton model as a general studio reference tool, just to be able to check what a person’s bones would look like from a particular angle.

When I received a cover assignment for a story that actually featured skeleton pirates I knew I could offer a starring role to my little actor.

The sketch above shows how I set up the skeleton, along with an actual human skull, next to my drawing table.

I tried various color sketches until I arrived at the muted color scheme. Then I found some photos of sailiing ships, treasure chests, and cannons to toss around on the deck.

A cannon shot has broken through the railing at right. His right leg is held together with a strip of cloth, and his missing left leg is replaced with the end of an oar, whittled into a simple hinge for his knee. He is a skeleton that refuses to die.

The new edition of the book, with this painting on the dustjacket, and signed by me on the title page, is available through the Dinotopia Store for $18.95 plus $3.50 shipping.