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!
