Kinuko Craft Master Post

Today, I met with my Harper Collins sales rep at work. And I got to see an ARC of the forthcoming book from Kinuko Craft and Mahlon Craft, Beauty and the Beast. I cannot even tell you how beautiful it is. The book comes out in July and there are very few images available yet, so I don’t want to gush about it too much. But, it reminded me of how much I love Craft’s illustrations, so I thought I would share some of my favorites.
The first book I remember finding with her illustrations was Cupid and Psyche. I picked it up from the Odyssey Bookshop in South Hadley, MA while I was in college.
I’ve picked up every picture book she’s done since. She’s also an amazing cover artist. I actually started reading Patricia McKillip because she had cover art by Kinuko Craft.
There aren’t very many artists that I feel that way about. Yoshitaka Amano is another one like that. I’ll at least look into any project that he does art for. I love several other artists, but they don’t typically have as much crossover into the book world.
When I went to DragonCon the first or second time, Kinuko Craft had some art on display. I stood in front of one of the paintings for almost twenty minutes. It was a large oil painting, I was familiar with the image because it was on a book that I had read. That was probably the first time I had seen the original of a book cover for a book I knew. That was amazing. I’ve been to museums on multiple continents. And these paintings deserve to be in any of them. This is the cover art for The Tower at Stony Wood by Patricia McKillip. It’s a novel based on the Lady of Shallot, but set in a secondary fantasy world, which is what McKillip excels in. The painting captures the feeling of the story perfectly. Its beautiful and intricate and everywhere you look there is something else to see.

Here are a few more of my favorite book covers:

This on is for Ombria in Shadow by Patricia McKillip. 

Biting the Sun by Tanith Lee