Books
These are a few of the books I have worked on. Many are still available, others have slipped into happy obscurity!
Here are some of the older jackets for Gomer and Pont. A variety of subjects and themes - good fun for an illustrator!
I've now notched up quite a few covers for the prolific author Jenny
Sullivan, who also added words to one of my 'Dragon Days' paintings.
You can find out more about the magical worlds Jenny has created by
going to her website:www.robsullivan.clara.net
A long time ago, Apple Press published my book about airbrushing. It
has been very successful and still crops up from time to time.
And another widely read book from not quite so long ago, 'The World of
the Medieval Knight', was published by MacDonald Young Books in 1996.
It contained nearly 140 separate illustrations and was a couple of
years in the making. I did more historical illustration when asked over
the next few years, but I gradually weaned myself off it and headed for
the dragons instead of the knights.
'Dragon Days' started as a series of paintings with no real end purpose
in mind. Gomer saw the first four completed pictures and suggested a
book of twelve main images, each with a smaller supporting picture, to
which twelve different authors would add words of prose or verse. And
to make it interesting, the Welsh version, 'Gwlad y Dreigiau' wouldn't
be the usual translation, but a totally separate series of writings
from twelve other authors re-interpreting the pictures. So a first for
me in that the authors wrote to what I painted rather than the usual
other-way-round. A timeline within the stories was added, so that the
books create the world of dragons from the fires of creation to the
modern attempt to build a greener world. Several of the images are on my gallery page, but here are a few more:
In February 2007, 'Dragon Days' got a second outing, when it was re-printed as a paperback. This is the new-look cover:
For more information about this project, click here.
A more recent project had me working in scraperboard to create the
illustrations to the fantastically dark stories Daniel Morden re-told
in his 'Dark Tales from the Woods'. Originally, these stories came from
the imagination of Abram Woods, a Romany storyteller who roamed Wales
in the eighteenth century, and there were plenty of striking images in
the text for me to get stuck into. There are a couple on my gallery
page, but here are a few more:
'A Gift for Saint David's Day' is another compilation of stories, plays
and poems by favourite Welsh authors, all writing pieces inspired by
the nation's patron saint. I was one of three illustrators involved in
the project, Suzanne Carpenter and Jac Jones being the other two, and
between us we helped to make this a vibrant and stunning book. One of
my text illustrations was chosen for the cover, and there is another
example on both my gallery and biography pages. Here is the cover and
another of the internal illustrations:
Further information about many of the books featured here can be found on the GOMER and PONT websites, where there is also more information about myself, and other illustrators.
