This lovely illustration, for the MG book series The School for Good and Evil, is by Italian illustrator Iacopo Bruno. It’s the cover art for the third book, The Last Ever After. Bruno’s previous covers were OK, but this one really knocks it out of the park with its black and white swans and twin …
I’m talking about the ones featured in The Lord of the Rings: sophisticated, powerful, conventional (in appearance) tools of mass destruction, masquerading as fine jewelry any 20th century European might want to wear. Foremost among them was Sauron’s One Ring, of course, of unadorned gold, with a mysterious script running around the inside as demonstrated …
Projected poster art for Jodorowsky’s Dune, the movie that never was. Paul Atreides/Muad’dib is at center. The names of the designers are at lower left, and if you follow their work, you can pinpoint what elements of the illustration they worked on: Foss the spacecraft, Giger the sandworm, Moebius the characters and perhaps that landscape. …
Illustrations for the fairy tale Beauty and the Beast all seem to highlight the same moment, as portrayed here. The two are seated together, the beast pledging his devotion, while Beauty looks away, pleased but ambivalent. This one, using the palette and style of the 1960s, shows the encounter in slightly abstracted form, with a …
The recent release of Villeneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune got me thinking about the many depictions of Feyd Rautha, Paul Atreides’ antithesis and rival, created by artists over the years. Why not the saintly Paul himself, you ask? Well, he’s just not as interesting. He spends most of the book in a stillsuit, the …
He was standing by the edge of a small pool—not more than ten feet from side to side—in a wood. The trees grew close together and were so leafy that he could get no glimpse of the sky. All the light was green light that came through the leaves: but there must have been a …
Mr. Tumnus pauses near the lamppost in this pen and ink illustration by Masianus Andrzej, which resembles a Victorian engraving.
Not all depictions of Narnia are positive. It is a scary place in a lot of ways — there’s an evil witch who turns innocent creatures to stone, a trusted friend betrays a child, and another child betrays his siblings, out of spite no less. The know-it-all hero — the Gandalf, if you will — …
Portal Fantasy: A subgenre of fantasy literature where inhabitants from our world enter a secondary one through a magical portal door or gate, or in some cases a magical object like a tree or mirror. Usually used in children’s fantasy but not always. The portal trope is a particularly robust one in speculative literature. Its …