Friday Favourites - Your Favourite Cover Artist?

Friday Favourites - a chance to rave about a favourite reading/book related topic each week.

Sometimes you just want a chance to rave about some favourite aspect of reading that doesn't really come up during regular blogging posts - that's what this is about. I'm willing to bet that at least some of those will come up one week or another.

This week I'm asking who your favourite cover artist is. It's a question I'm curious about as despite the saying "don't judge a book by it's cover", everyone does so to a certain extent.

Please leave either your response in the comments or a link to your response.

My answer is:

I've got three favourite cover artists actually.
There's Jody A. Lee, who's done the art on a lot of the books I've read. It's gotten to the point where I can see a book and say "that's a Jody A. Lee cover" before I check the book to be sure. Typically her covers are usually on DAW books. I've noted her artwork on the following to date: Micky Zucker Reichert's Renshai books and  the Valdemar books by Mercedes Lackey (and also some of her other titles too), and a number of other authors and titles. She's actually about the only cover artist I can recognize like this - her work is rather distinctive and doesn't change from author to author or series.

My second favourite isn't technically a cover artist to the best of my knowledge: Alan Lee. I love his Lord of the Rings artwork, which was used by HarperCollins for some editions of The Lord of the Rings. Until I checked though just now, I honestly thought their covers for the History of Middle-Earth series were Alan Lee paintings as well. Turns out that they're actually John Howe's artwork instead - my other favourite for Tolkien-themed artwork. There's just something about the atmosphere that Alan Lee manages to invoke in his paintings that's perfect for Middle-Earth in my mind.

The third cover artist on my list is actually juggling for top place: the cover artist for the trade-paperback editions of Hand of Isis and Black Ships (or so I'm guessing - my copy of Black Ships seems to have disappeared again). Actually, as I think I've said before, Hand of Isis is a book I picked up on the strength of the cover alone.

Not only that, but the cover for this edition of Hand of Isis holds place as my all-time favourite piece of cover art, as I noted in a previous Friday Favourites post. There's just something about the way Debra Lill has done these two covers that I absolutely love. I'd be curious to see any other cover art of hers too and see if this particular style is something that's typical of all her work or something specific to her Jo Graham covers.

So, who's your favourite cover artist, and why?