My studio space used to be a home office for the man who built our house. He was a contractor. Most of the rooms are small, unfortunately, but I have one larger room that is big enough for me to keep a couple of easels in for my larger work. Since I always seem have a number of projects going on at any one time, the place is usually a mess: reference materials, sketches, layouts on acetate or tracing paper, and all the paints, palettes and other gear are scattered about so I can find them as I need them. Every once in a while it gets to a point where I feel it is making things more difficult than I can stand, whereupon I’ll do a general cleanup.

Since I work both in acrylics and oils I try to keep the media confined to separate areas in my studio so the paints and brushes intended for each medium don’t get mixed up. I do most of my acrylic painting—and all my illustration work—in a small room that is about 8′ x 10′. One wall is taken up with a vent hood from an industrial-type air handler that insures a constant flow of air out of the room when I am using a spray gun or airbrush.

I have speakers in all the main rooms of my studio, since I am usually listening to music or audiobooks while I’m working.

Good question! For each of the hundreds of book cover illustrations I’ve done in the past 30-odd years, there have been from 2 to 22 alternate concepts done which were not selected. In rare cases the concepts were general enough, and finished enough, to allow them to work as artwork for another book or an album cover. Mostly, though, my illustrations are so tightly fitted to the story that they aren’t suitable for uses outside the one they were originally intended for.

In the case of a serial set of books, however, the opposite can be true. For example, I did the cover paintings for many of the YEAR’S BEST HORROR STORIES collections published by DAW Books from 1970s through the 1990s. It often happened that an idea not selected one year would be picked in a subsequent year, so it was well worth me hanging onto them and resubmitting them.

This may well be the case for Brandon Sanderson’s STORMLIGHT ARCHIVE books, though I doubt it. While it’s true I came up with several cover concepts for the first book, I suspect that each succeeding book will be so packed with interesting elements and image possibilities that I won’t be content to simply recycle something done for the first volume.

KALADIN STORMBLESSED

THE WAY OF KINGS (2010)

THE WAY OF KINGS was so vast in scope that it seemed almost impossible for me to try to encapsulate such a rich and complex story within a single image. I was torn between the different characters and story lines woven into the book, so i did sketches of different aspects of the story to try them out and help me decide.

After a short period of exploration, however, I found myself most drawn to the Shattered Plain and the storms which play such an important role in the story. Since i knew the Brandon would be writing other books in the series I decided to devote the cover image to an overall view of the setting, giving primacy to the environment itself rather than focus on one particular character or another. It was hard to do, for Brandon invests his characters and their attributes with a wealth of original detail that begs to be realized visually. But that can be done in illustrations on future volumes…if I can wait that long!