Cover Art for The Untold Ranger Tales
And the story behind the picture.
Let me preface my comments by saying that this surprise is the result of several months' and several people's work. As you know, we've just completed part ten of the Untold Ranger Tales. Up until now, there's been no artwork to go along with the Tales. So, like any good entrepeneurs, we decided to hire it done--figuratively speaking.
First, we went to artist extraordinaire Shelley Pleger, to help us with concept pictures of our original characters. I'll be putting those concept pictures up in the near future. Then because we wanted this first picture to serve as the cover, we sought out our favorite RR cover artist, Charles Williams. Using what we and Shelley had come up with, he created a story cover for us to our exact (exacting?) specs.
The picture was great, but it wasn't a color picture, so I decided right then and there that it deserved a quality job. For this, I took the work myself. I started back on April 8th, and have just now completed work on the last of it all. It challenged my artistic abilities, and I think you'll find that the result was worth the effort put into it.
I'm putting this image out as a jpeg for two reasons--number one, it's big. The higher-quality bitmap version was nearly four megs, and I don't have the space to host something that size. Second, this'll make it far easier to download. There was a slight loss of quality in the transfer, but only very slight--in fact, I'd probably have to point out the differences.
So, with much thanks to Shelley Pleger and particularly to Charles Williams, here is the Cover Art for The Untold Ranger Tales. I hope you'll enjoy it as much as we have!