Thanks to everyone for a sensational sale of my work through Heritage.com. I have two more sketches from some of my favorite projects, and I have some stories to go along with them. Please click on the link to see a full sized .jpg of the sketch:

[https://comics.HA.com/c/search.zx?saleNo=322610&collection=101&FC=0&type=friend-consignorlive-notice](https://comics.HA.com/c/search.zx?saleNo=322610&collection=101&FC=0&type=friend-consignorlive-notice) 

1. “Forever After” by Roger Zelazny. I aways loved when I was assigned Zelazney’s book since they were so filled with great imagery—it made my job easy. The biggest problem was figuring out which scene to do! The publisher, Jim Baen, chose this scene of the prince playing cards with a dragon, and I filled the painting with “second read” material for readers who took the time to really study the cover. If you look closely at the cover, you will discover that the prince has a royal flush, and will definitely win the hand. The dragon’s hoard includes many treasures, including the Venus DeMilo statue, and my own painting of the Subway Wizard. I nearly went crazy painting all of the gold coins on the ground, but I finally use a potato that I carved a coin shape into, dipping it in paint, and then stamping the coins.

2. “Majyk by Hook or Crook” by Esther Friesner. Esther is one of my favorite humorous writers. In person, she looks like a blond high school cheer leader, and I asked her to pose for one of my covers, “Unicorn U,” which she wrote. She is the blond cheerleader on the left. 

All of her books are laugh-out-loud funny. I am not generally thought of as a humorous illustrator, but I actually love when I get assigned those books, and I think some of my best covers were the funny ones. Like Zelazney, Esther’s books were filled with great scenes, so it was easy to do 4 terrific sketches for her book. Some great writers were headaches for illustrators since they didn’t include character descriptions, or write visually. Asimov was the classic example—he was a great writer, but he wasn’t writing for his illustrators. Illustrators love writers who fill their heads with ideas.

The publisher went with the idea with the giant cat, undoubtedly to nab in the audience of cat lovers, like me.

Mattingly prelims