I have supplied art for over 35 books. The level of contribution has varied from a small black and white illustration to creating the whole book myself. That was Celtic Dreams back in 1998. I did all the typesetting, page layout and design for it, teaching myself what I needed to know as I went along. The most important lesson I learned from that title was, don’t do the whole book myself. Subsequent books have benefitted from the creative input of others. But gaining a basic knowledge of desk top publishing has been useful. There is a list of books covering every book I have been involved in, with a very brief description of the type of content that I contributed.

My first commission to produce art for a book came in mid 1994, shortly after my first set of cards being published. It was a case of being in the right place at the right time. My rather cheeky phone call to Element Books, asking if they wanted to use my artwork, coincided with their producing ‘The Encyclopaedia of Celtic Wisdom’ by Caitlin and John Matthews. I got the job.

This led to a contact at Blandford Press, editor Stuart Booth, who oversaw my early major book projects. Which are covered on the page Three Books. My work and style has moved on since these three books but I leave them on this site as a historical record of my work.

Most of the books have required me to do pieces that are not at all Celtic and more figurative than work I had been doing previously. This has allowed me to develop as an artist and so been invauable to me. They have mostly been monochrome pen and ink images. Quite old fashioned really, as I mostly use a steel dip pen along with technical drawing pens. See the examples in the Gallery section for some of these.

From August 2002 to June 2003 I worked on a large scale project for the publishers David and Charles involving over 250 images. The title is 'The Crafter's Design Library - Fantasy'. It was published in February 2004. This was a follow up from 2002's work on 'The Crafter's Design Library - Celtic' title also for David and Charles which was published in February 2003. Since initial publication, both books have been reprinted as paperbacks. Also, both titles have a German, Russian and Chinese editions and Fantasy has a French edition. In September 2007, Fantasy was re-issued and re-packaged in a different format under the title The Ultimate Fantasy Sourcebook and CD-Rom also published by David and Charles Ltd.

In September 2007, my book The Crafters Design Library - Fantasy was re-issued and re-packaged in a different format under the title The Ultimate Fantasy Sourcebook also published by David and Charles Ltd.

Another productive strand, has been to illustrate the Real Witches series of books by the author Kate West. See her web site for many more examples of my art work.

© Chris Down 2007