Monday, February 24, 2014

Seven of Seven Cover & Process

My old pal, Scott Ralph, contacted me recently and said something like this, "I'm writing 9 novellas that are going to combine together into one giant story, wanna do covers for all of them?" To be honest, I haven't read anything Scott's written in 15+ years when we were in art school together but he's always been a great storyteller so I said "Sure!" I was pleasantly surprised when this first book was so good that it had me on the edge of my seat the whole way through. I really love it and am so happy and proud to be a small part of the team putting this big story out into the world. Scott tells me that book 2 is shaping up as we speak and I'll be preparing to do the second cover very soon.

In the meantime you can buy the Kindle ebook of this on Amazon right now for 2 bucks (apparently you can download a Kindle app for Android, iOS and PC if you don't have an actual Kindle). After the jump, check out some of my initial thumbnails and rough sketches for the cover.



Saturday, February 8, 2014

Swedish Chef & His Hot Dog!

 More Catch up posting! This was a Christmas gift watercolor painting for our good friends Clay & Elliwati Stricklin (and their wire-haired dachsund Nick!) Clay posted an awesome video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWB-EMCmrTo) a few Halloween's ago where he dressed as the Swedish Chef and threatened Nick with a short life as a hot dog - this painting was meant as a tribute to that. Check below for a photo of Nick and the initial thumbnail from a night where the idea struck and I scribbled it down without remembering what the Swedish Chef actually looks like.

Thursday, February 6, 2014

Sneeze!

I've been pretty lax with this blog since, like a lot of people, I started using Tumblr (check out my Tumblr blog here: http://chrispurdin.tumblr.com/). I may switch over to that entirely at some point but, for now, I'm going to bring this one up to date over the next few days. Starting with this illustration I did for the SCBWI Tomie DePaola Award Contest - not a winner but I had fun making it. Check back tomorrow for what's next!