Six vistas of wonder

Last week I finally had the chance to meet up with Kevin Jenkins, who painted all six Fabled Lands covers. Jamie and I had supplied rough sketches for those covers to the publisher, but I don't recall that we ever got the opportunity to speak with Kevin directly. In the intervening years, he's moved over to working on movies, and was the digital environment supervisor on Prince of Persia, Clash of the Titans and a bunch of other eye-popping SFX blockbusters.

I told Kevin our plans to reissue the series and it turns out he's quite a fantasy games fan, having played a lot of RuneQuest and other RPGs and boardgames. To our delight, he's agreed to let us use the original covers on the new edition - and, even better, he's willing to become Fabled Lands's art direction consultant. That means that, as long as his busy schedule allows, we'll have the advice of one of the movie industry's top visual talents to guide the look and feel of future Fabled Lands products.

In particular, of course, I'm thinking of the covers of Books 7 and on. Kevin isn't going to have time to paint those himself (well, not unless James Cameron gives him a month off!) but he'll help us find the right artists and make sure they are briefed properly. So between Kevin Jenkins and fantasy illustration king Russ Nicholson, I reckon we have all our artistic bases covered.

Kevin is currently making some changes to the cover of Book 1 (above) which apparently he's been wanting to revise for over 15 years. Can't wait to see what he does with it!