ROBIN L GRAY
AUTHOR OF THE MING REALITIES SERIES
I collaborated with cover artist Duncan Long to produce artwork that used planetary nebula as a starting point.
I sent him a Hubble Telescope image of the butterfly nebula back in 2013, which morphed and grew into the beautiful cover for book one: MING.
The cat’s eye nebula was the inspiration for the cover of book two: PARADOX.
Read more about Duncan’s development of the cover art here:
Taken from us too soon last year, I’ll always be grateful for his friendship, and his incredible talent.
I collaborated with my new cover artist, Jeff Brown, on the cover of Book Three.
Continuing the theme of using planetary nebula as a starting point, the Orion Nebula was the inspiration for the cover of MURMUR.
Jeff did a spectacular job of honoring Duncan’s legacy by keeping the look of the previous covers, while using his own fantastic imagination to produce this beautiful and dynamic image.
I worked with Robert Altbauer, fantasy map maker extraordinaire, to create the MING’S GALAXY character map. I found a series of celestial maps of the heavens by Scottish writer and schoolmaster, Alexander Jamieson, which we used to model the first map, designed to serve as a guide to the various planets and characters that appear in the books.
A map appears in the front of each book, tailored to reflect the characters in that particular volume.
See more of Robert’s work at www.fantasy-map.net
