New Artist Crush Mondays: Tom Kidd

None But Man Cover Art By Tom Kidd

One of the jobs I think I'd like to do someday is paint cover images for sci-fi and fantasy books. Recently it came to my attention that one of my favorite webcomics, Girl Genius, has published a novel (in fact, Girl Genius day is on the 12th, which is a day when the authors encourage those looking to purchase their book to buy it in hopes that the high sales data will catch the attention of book distributors).

I was surprised to find that instead of one of the Foglio's having done the cover art (being both artists themselves), it was an artist by the name of Tom Kidd. Kidd has done the covers for several books and has that wonderful attention to detail that always makes me want to hang my fiction collection on the wall instead of shoving it on a shelf.

It seems though, that the ways of the cover-image artist is going the way of sign-letters as increasingly less imaginative photoshop-collages and public domain images grace the face of paperbacks. My copy of Dracula has a sunny hillside castle with wildflowers on it...which really doesn't set the right tone for the story.

Instead I will sit here and drool over Kidd's work and continue to comb the re-sale shops for older, more imaginative editions of my favorite fiction paperbacks.

Link! Ho!
http://spellcaster.com/tomkidd/