(Cover for The Robots of Dawn by Issac Asimov, 1984)
Michael Whelan’s Works of Wonder ~Michael Whelan
–Copyright 1987
–a Del Rey Book (Ballantine Books)
–106 pages
–8/10
About a week ago Jim Black posted a review of a book entitled Wonderworks featuring the art of Michael Whelan (review here). My blog friend Susan and I commented over there and she let me know that she might have an extra one of those books, which she then offered to me as a gift. It turned out not to be the exact same book, but you will hear no complaints from me. I came home Friday to find this in my mailbox and it was an awesome surprise. Not only is it a very nice quality hardback book of one of my favorite (since childhood) SF/F illustrators, but it contains several of the illustrations which sparked the flame of fandom in the first place.
In addition to fantastic full-page illustrations printed in gorgeous color on high-quality paper, each image has a facing page with text about the image, written by Michael Whelan, and smaller images of sketches, thumbnails and alternate ideas. One of the things I was thrilled to discover is that Michael Whelan is an artist who actually reads the manuscripts (twice, at least) before beginning work on the illustration. And you can tell by some of the comments that he is a fan of the genre.
Before I take you behind the scenes to see a small sampling of the images in this volume, here are a couple of program notes:
1. The picture at the top of this post is the actual cover image for Michael Whelan’s World of Wonder, but the title text is not original. I couldn’t find a quality image of the cover so I just picked a couple of fonts somewhat near the actual book and did what I could for a mock up.
2. Each image is followed by the book title and author that the illustration graces as well as a date. The date is the release date for this version of the book, not necessarily the first publication of the story.
Okay, let’s see some art!
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