The Interior Art for the In the Time of the Dead Trilogy

For those of you who don't know, I’m the author and illustrator for the “In the Time of the Dead Trilogy.” What holding these titles means is that I not only had the chance to write the books, but I was also able to do the covers and the interior artwork for them. For someone like me, a person who has always loved everything about books, it was kind of a dream come true. So what I’m going to show you now is the three different styles I used to do the interior work that is sprinkled through each of the books.

We’ll start with the first book in the series, "The Zombie Axiom."

For all the books, I completed the illustrations digitally, using Photoshop. But as you can see in this book, I tried doing a bit of a pen and ink, crosshatching technique, where the darker values are built up with lines drawn upon lines. Like this: 

 

And this:

Now, I really like working with this technique, and I was very satisfied with the finished pieces. However, for the next book I was interested in a look that wasn’t so hard-edged. I wanted something a bit more rough and dirty-feeling.

This brings me to the images in the second book in the series,  

“The Warring Dead.”

Here, I discarded the pen and ink style and used a pencil technique for the shading as shown in the image below:

And this: 

  

Again, I was really happy with the outcome. I had cool, rough and ready finished illustrations that were just gritty enough for the subject matter. The only problem was that they took forever to finish.

Naturally, then, this brings me to the final book in the series,  

“The Eternal Undead.”

 

In this book, you’ll find images that were done with an airbrush technique. They are a lot darker, with more heavy areas of black. Like this: 

          And this:

This technique was a lot of fun. I really liked the brooding quality many of the images have, and I felt they were the perfect complement to the ending of a series. Well, make that the perfect complement to the ending of this series. You’ll have to read it to find out why!