This is the cover art from an early, out of print edition of A DISTANT SOIL. I hired a photographer to shoot my covers, and this is scanned from a negative. It’s not particularly good quality, but back then, I had no way to judge the quality of the archives I was getting. The original art is painted in colored ink. The big difference between this edition and the current edition is that the interior art is in color. However, the printing was really garish. Also, my inking line took on a really hard edge when I was working on this book. I think I responded to pressure that my…

This piece is hybrid work, scanned from a very early, out-of-print edition of the book. The original art was done in colored inks. The reproduction was quite poor, garish in fact. I took the scan, tweaked it in Photoshop, then added some of the digital sky elements later. This is some years old, before I knew more about digital painting, and has some issues, but it’s still a pretty image!

This is a really early mixed media painting of Dunstan, and it should be obvious from looking at it that it is circa 1980’s. This is scanned from a transparency photo of the original painting.

Colored pencil portrait, which I later used as a back cover, I think. This was scanned from a copy because we didn’t have computer for this back then, so the original looks much better than this. Textured paper is tricky to print as well.

This is partially colored by hand and digitally. One of my early digital coloring experiments. I found the hand colored version of this while cleaning out my files! I have been swamped with work most of the year, but finished a major project a few weeks ago, and am finishing up another in late September. Even so, I decided I needed to make time to get my art files in order. It was one of my major New Year’s Resolutions. My art has never really been in order. The situation was made even worse when someone I consigned to scan the archives ran off with the art. It took two…

This is one of my earliest A DISTANT SOIL pieces. Or, perhaps better described as one of my earliest King Arthur pieces. This pencil art dates back to when I was about 19 years old. It really isn’t bad for a teen. I put it down and picked it up to tighten up a few years later, but it didn’t change much. I made a print of it and later sold the original for a song, back when my art wasn’t worth very much. Then I saw it for sale again and bought it back. I was able to get very good high quality scans of it. Then I sold…

I don’t have a good quality scan of this, but this was one of my early attempts at animation cel painting, which almost no one does anymore. I suppose it’s much easier to get this look on computer. I redesigned all of the A DISTANT SOIL characters for animation at some point, probably one of those movie options that come and go. I will have to dig them up.

I searched in vain for the high res version of this file, but it appears that I either failed to save some of my ADS portraits at high res, or the original file got lost or deleted at some point. Very frustrating. This is a pencil art, hand painted hand made paper, digital combo. 1997.