DIGITAL ART | ILLUSTRATION | YEAR IN REVIEW
Cover Illustrations Through 2 Years on Medium
Painting covers for fantasy, historical fiction, horror, memoir, and fanfiction has been a dream come true.
What I love most about this platform is my connection with good writers and great editors. While the income I generate here is nothing I can live on, it pays for my membership. More importantly, it keeps me in absinthe.
I’ve also had the chance to combine my art with my writing, which is heavenly. Every story requires a cover image, which most authors acquire through stock or their own photography. I paint most of my own.
I started drawing as a child, using pencils and charcoal. I tried every black-and-white and color fine art medium available, including 3D materials like clay, plaster, wood, and papier-mâché.
I worked freelance for many years, preferring illustration to graphic design and making print-ready advertisements, logos, pamphlets, and posters. My first full-time job was for a t-shirt company, creating designs using Adobe Photoshop and making spot and 4-color process screenprint separations. I moved on to web design. I left for digital painting permanently only when the iPad Pro came along since I could never manage a Wacom tablet.
I paint in Procreate and Clip Studio Paint and edit in Adobe Photoshop. I rely on airbrushes, specialty brushes for things like fabric and hair, and lighting filters over layers. My mood and time determine whether I create realistic, painterly, pulp, comic, color, or grayscale illustrations.
My Diary of a Psychoanalysis series includes screenshots of some childhood drawings. I haven’t done traditional work in a decade and still have stacks of half-used specialty papers and canvas.
Below is a selection of covers from my Medium series, one-shots, and fanfiction.
As a creator and proliferous producer, I’m familiar with the process of draft, revising, finishing, and meeting deadlines. That means I love some and not others.
Sometimes, I nailed the scene and am pleased with the layout, lighting, expressions, feelings, and mood. Other images are merely functional because I’m disappointed in something. But I’m proud of all of them because I can recall the hours toiling, the hours deciding, and the final hour when I had to call it done despite my struggle with perfectionism.
I consider myself a good artist but a great writer. However, I recognize that more people find my art accessible. If these images pique your interest, there’s also a story to read…
The Velvet Trap | Secrets of the Velvet Trap
The Depression-era, slow-burn psychological drama follows the turbulent relationship between Dr. Eleanor Wentworth, a radical psychoanalyst, and her troubled patient, Edith “Eddie” Langley, a young reporter. With her compulsion for broken women, Eleanor finds herself inexorably drawn in by Eddie’s wounded sexuality, and their professional relationship evolves into a passionate affair.
The Velvet Trap | Tales From the Velvet Trap
Dangerous love and self-discovery in Prohibition Chicago, blending erotic tension with emotional depth. Desire, dominance, and the price of freedom during the roaring twenties.
Darklaw | Blood Dries, Darklaw Saga
An outlaw must conquer not only her brother’s army but her own insatiable ambition. And what of her love for the woman prophesied to end the world? They will take what they want. They will take what they can. When you’re a god, everything is permitted. Avestine, a legendary hero, and Kami, a young idealist, navigate a complicated relationship and battle their own ambitions in a saga of power, lust, and gods.
Darklaw | Savage Sinru
The world knew him as the Barbarian. Some called him ‘thief’ and ‘slayer.’ Others called him ‘hero.’ One called him ‘father.’ She was Sinru, product of a drunken night the Barbarian spent in a nameless village before he wandered to lands far away. Sinru grew up strong and willful, angry and hedonistic. When the masters of empire burned her village and took her mother, she, too, wandered. She came into the world like a storm — dark-eyed, cursed, ravenous — to challenge the powers on earth and defy the dominion of demons.
One Shot Story Covers | Historical, Fantasy, Horror, Memoir, Pulp
Good Omens | Fanfiction from the Television Series (AO3)
A series of short stories and artwork set in an alternate universe with a fallen Aziraphale and angel Crowley — literary, historical, and erotic. Amid the contentious relationship is a complex bond between master and slave, aesthete and spiritualist, lover and beloved.
