Artist Feature: Christina Cartwright

TFF wouldn’t have been able to run for the last eleven years without the input of our heroic, generous and talented team of artists, who illustrate every story we publish with work that is every bit as creative and important as the stories and poems themselves. One of the artists who has worked with us for the longest is Christina Cartwright, book cover illustrator at Digitell Design, who first joined us in 2006 with an illustration for “Deadline,” and followed up with the Dali-esque surreal cover art for issue #11. If you’ve been following TFF for any length of time at all, you’ve certainly come across some of her detailed, dramatic, digital illustrations. We asked Christina to tell us a bit about her illustrating and artistic work elsewhere, and she has prepared the following showcase for us—if you like what you see, she can also be commissioned for custom cover design in many different styles, including children’s illustration. Over to you, Chris!

---

Christina Cartwright has a degree in visual communications and has been creating book covers, story illustrations and posters since 2003. She has also created images for games and various other projects. Chris lives in south west Indiana with her husband Tom and 3 cats Buffy, Piper and Gypsy.

Anyone who knows me knows I adore vampires. It is my favorite genre of the horror industry. And in the fantasy genre, dragons is my subject of choice. There was a time several years back, I dreamed of a story of a woman who was part vampire and part dragon. I started to write this story, but I am no writer. So, I looked up a fellow I created a few covers for and asked him if he would be interested in writing about my dragon/vampire lady and he agreed. I created the cover for it and it was titled Dragon Blood. (Zoom for larger image.)


As a small child, I can barely remember the imaginary friend I had. I guess a lot of kids have imaginary friends. I wish I could remember more about mine, but I do remember her name was Kathy. This story, The Adventures of Adam and the Incredibly Mysterious Zorkins, by Ronnie Glazer, is about a boy who discovers some very small beings who are not imaginary. It is a really cute story and I had a lot of fun illustrating it!


I created a series of three covers for a man and wife team of writers. J.K. Barber (Jay and Katie) is what they call themselves. I created their logo for them too. I worked directly with Katie. She was tough one to please, but we had a great time working together and she pushed me to do the best I could do. I learned a lot working for her! This is the cover for the second volume in their trilogy, Icebound.


I work on children’s books the most. I really enjoy the stories that people come up with, I have a lot of fun with them. With kid’s stories, anything goes! Sometimes work gets slow, so at one point I wanted to learn how to format the interior of a book. I decided to write a small children’s book and of course illustrate it too. As I said before, I am no writer, but I gave it my best shot. I wanted the experience. So I created Gina Gets Glasses. It didn’t turn out too bad and I may do another story about Gina.


Another genre I enjoy is Sci Fi. Another great way to let the imagination run wild! This cover below is for the story Libertas and Thunderbolt. It is a story about a male and female who are the creators of humans and the Earth. It is a really cool story!


And that leads us to The Future Fire. One of the very first magazines to be kind enough to allow me to illustrate some of their stories. And I even created a couple of covers for them! I will always be thankful to Djibril and his magazine crew! Here you can see one of the covers and illustrations I created for TFF, based on the story Soul Catcher by Christel Bodenbender.


For myself, I enjoy all types of stories and art, anywhere from horror to children’s books and inbetween. I create either cartoon-like or the realistic style images… anything you can dream up! If you are looking for a cover artist or a story illustrator or both, look me up!

You can find my website/portfolio at: digitelldesign.com and you can email me at: chris@digitelldesign.com.

Thank you for reading!