Cobblestone

Finished up a 4 page project for a children’s magazine publisher this week. This will be for an upcoming story in the October issue, an adaptation of the ‘Minotaur’ story from Greek myth. I went back and forth on this one, with regards to how I should portray the figures on the faux ‘greek urn pieces’. On the one hand, I wanted to emulate the style of Grecian figures that you would normally see on pottery of this type, but at the same time, I also wanted to stay in keeping with my normal ‘scratchboard style’. So I ended up sort of doing a cross between the two.
These ‘broken pottery shards’ actually spread themselves across a two page spread, and in and around the type, but in order to show it on the blog, I’ve done a little editing and rearranging.

Also this week, I had a fast turnaround book cover assignment from a local publisher. This is for a humorous book on female menopause, and is a rare chance to work in a cartoon style. A fun little assignment.

ADDENDUM: This, in fact, ended up being the very last time I would do any work for Carus Publishing, after a nearly twenty year relationship. I had grown frustrated with their policy of taking over a year to pay for work. A shame, because I often enjoyed the assignments.

This month I had a book project for Cobblestone Publishing, a client that I’d been doing magazine work for over the previous 2 years. This was a collection of Native American myths, legends and stories, and I was one of three ‘scratchboard’ artists assigned to different sections of the book. My illustrations take up the middle third of the volume, mostly concerned with Native American folklore and tribal history, and constituted about 25-30 illustrations. This book is still available on Amazon (link here) and was the winner of the 1995 Book Builder’s of Boston Award for Excellence in Graphic Arts.

A few of the originals still survive (the frog, the wolf, the buffalo stampede), and others were scanned from a copy of the book in my collection. If I remember correctly, the image of the ‘globe’ below (with animals marching around it) was reused by the client for xmas cards later in the year.

When I first wrote this blog post, around 2009, I shared only a few samples from the book, but I am updating the posting in 2018 and sharing each and every one of the illustrations for the first time since publication.

Tim Foley illustration

More Than Three Decades of Getting Away With Drawing Pictures for a Living

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