01. Early Years
Arabesques
© Karl A. Foster 1989, Acrylic, Watercolour and Ink. Actual book jacket design for the novel by Anton Shammas.
This image came to me in a dream. This novel is fascinating and has stayed with me since 1989. The green sky came from a fragment of texture that I had painted green to pass the time between jobs. I was asked to produce a colour rough by the art director and in an attempt to show how the textures in my work would look I grabbed the green sky texture and red paint and quickly compiled a rough and rushed to Penguin Books. This was the start of my great career as an illustrator! How wrong I was, this was a high point. It was 1996 before I felt that things were back on track.