23JUN2025

Hello! Long time, no talk. Long time, never talk? This is my first blog post. Thanks so much for checking it out! Maybe if I keep this going for a while, I could say “thanks so much for scrolling all the way down here.” We’ll see, I guess. I’m intending to keep posting these every Monday from now until… whenever. I’m also intending to really pick up the art creation and start doing some design work. If I end up making things that are good, I’ll make another tab on here to show them off.

Today, I started working on an old illustration piece that I began last year. I’m coming off of a break from painting digitally, and decided to pick it back up. Rather than going through a bunch of ideation, I chose to pick up an old idea. I’m working on a book cover for book two of The Wheel of Time (a fantastic, if sometimes slow, fantasy novel series made by Robert Jordan, and finished by Brandon Sanderson after Jordan’s death), titled “The Great Hunt.” I have a collection of the old edition hardcovers of this whole series. After the Amazon show came out, they made a whole bunch of new covers that are quite boring. This is really the book of the series that stole my attention. I listened to the series on audiobook over the course of my first year freelancing, and I remember working on final drawing for the portrait of Chairman Benny Thompson (this one) while listening to the part of the book that I decided to illustrate for this cover. This illustration has been cooking for a while. I haven’t stopped thinking about it, but I did take about a year-long break from working on it. It’s been nice to get back into it, and to blow the dust off of the Wacom Tablet. I’ll be posting updates about all of this next week.

Here’s some pictures of what I’ve been working on! This includes a couple preliminary sketches, where I’m currently at in my drawing (the blue lines are guides for where the cover will be split between front, spine, cover, and the front and back flaps), and the reference picture I’m working from. It also includes the old cover (which isn’t my favorite book cover ever, but it’s fun and looks great: originally illustrated/painted by Darrell K. Sweet), and the new cover (I do really like the actual painting, but overall I am unimpressed by the design and framing of this cover: the painting was done by Kekai Kotaki).