GALLERY

About

Hello, I'm a freelance illustrator based in the UK.

I was born in London, and started out in illustration with work for fantasy & horror small press magazines in the '80s, in particular the H.P. Lovecraft-devoted Dagon. My first professional commissions came from Games Workshop for their magazine White Dwarf, and this began a long relationship with the company, illustrating lots of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay publications and the very first Warhammer 40,000 book, as well as many other GW books and boardgames. I've also done game-related material for other publishers, including covers and internal illustrations for twenty-two (I think) of the Fighting Fantasy series from Puffin Books/Wizard Books, and card art for Magic: The Gathering from Wizards of the Coast.

I've also produced artwork for various publishers around the world including Scholastic, Time-Warner, HarperCollins and Oxford University Press, illustrating popular authors such as Anne McCaffrey, Raymond E. Feist and Harry Turtledove, as well as some classics including Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde and The Silver Sword. I was fortunate enough to receive the British Fantasy Award for Best Artist.

I illustrated the book accompanying the album release of Misterstourworm & the Kelpie's Gift, an orchestral work based on stories and characters from Scottish legend. My artwork was used as large-scale backdrops for live performances of the work by The Orchestra of Scottish Opera, with narration by Lord of the Rings actor Billy Boyd.

As an author, I've written some books about digital art including Digital Fantasy Painting Workshop and Digital Horror Art, and edited Fantasy Art Now published by Collins. In addition to work in publishing, I occasionally do concept and production art for computer games (following two years as an in-house artist at Eidos Interactive), and film and television productions which have included the BAFTA-nominated The Magician of Samarkand for the BBC, and most recently Gulliver's Travels for 20th Century Fox.

Currently: October 2015: My latest picture book The Crocodolly was published in hardback by Scholastic last month, and is available in Australia, New Zealand, and soon to be released throughout Asia in English, also with a translation into Chinese. The Crocodolly is something of a companion to my earlier picture book The Octopuppy which has been doing pretty well internationally -- more info at www.theoctopuppy.com Right now I'm working on my next picture book; so most of my energies have been directed towards my books for children. But I've also just finished another album cover for Axel Rudi Pell, which is the fifth sleeve I've done for his records. I've also been doing a little bit of work on the Game of Thrones computer game.

martin@martinmckenna.net

List of Published Work

List of Clients

Merchandise at Wardrobe Of Terror

The old martinmckenna.net

The Octopuppy

Prints at ArtPal

Artwork Archive at Flickr

News from March 2012

Circle of the Oath

Monday, March 26, 2012

Circle of the Oath is the third album cover I've done for Axel Rudi Pell. An early rough was featured in a previous post. The image evolved considerably from that early stage under Axel's guidance. A bluer version was used in print to make the packaging of the various editions and tour merchandise more, well... blue.

The Limited Edition Digipack, below, can be bought here

The Limited Edition Double LP Gatefold Blue Marbled Vinyl can be purchased here

The Limited Box Set, available here

The tour poster. More about Axel's movements on the band's site

The album can be downloaded here

Skinned

Sunday, March 4, 2012

The cover for Skinned, the second book in The Shadowing series by Adam Slater, published by Egmont.

A grayscale rough, above. In the print edition, same as with the first book, the witch's face on the cover is embossed and strategically varnished to make the face pop out three-dimensionally. So you, lucky reader, can run your finger across her lovely slippery bumps. Be afeared at The Shadowing site.

Packed Lurnch

Sunday, March 4, 2012

Just to keep Jon Green lycanthrope-spotting, here's another outing for that poor bugger of a werewolf. This one amounts to a trip to the park for a poo and a quick game of frisbee. It's the cover for this digital album by LuRCH PacK; more details and download here.

The Desperate Dwarf

Saturday, March 3, 2012

The cover I did for The Desperate Dwarf, the third book in the Grim and Grimmer series by Ian Irvine published by the excellent Omnibus Books, an imprint of Scholastic.

The back of the book features a silhouette of our hero Ike, this time with a massively inflated arse which is causing him to float off in Rod Stewart style. A couple of roughs, below, of the dwarf. The earlier one on the right obviously needed much more dwarfing up at this stage. Note the character's distinctive moustache formed from his nostril hair. Something I'm thinking of going for meself.