Michael Whelan's Works of Wonder by Michael Whelan

He says that his job 'involved all sorts of tasks related to the anatomy department, such as preparing cadavers for the classes, stringing bones together to make complete skeletons, making models of body parts, some medical illustration, etc.' Some of his collegiate medical drawings appeared in The Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery. There he worked in the Anatomy and Physiology Department, gaining a first-hand knowledge of human anatomy. Whelan continued school as a pre-medical biology major at San Jose State University, initially.

By his final year of high school, his family had moved again, to San Jose, California where he graduated from Oak Grove High School in 1968. There he began formal training in art, taking summer classes at the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design. Recently, he painted the cover art for thrash metal band Evile's album Infected Nations.īy the time he was a sophomore in high school, his family had moved to Denver, Colorado. He painted original works for the covers of Meat Loaf's Bat Out of Hell II: Back into Hell and The Very Best of Meat Loaf albums and several of his older paintings illustrate the liner notes of the former. and Roots Soulfly's Dark Ages Obituary's Cause of Death and every album by the Elric-influenced metal band Cirith Ungol. Whelan provided covers and interior illustrations for Stephen King's The Gunslinger and The Dark Tower, the first and last of his Dark Tower books.Ĭover art by Michael Whelan has graced many music record albums including Demolition Hammer's Epidemic of Violence, The Jacksons' Victory Sepultura's Beneath the Remains, Arise, Chaos A.D. Beam Piper's Fuzzy novels, and Tad Williams's Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, Otherland, and Shadowmarch series and Brandon Sanderson's The Stormlight Archive. Heinlein's novels including Friday and The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, the Ace editions of H. Lovecraft's short story collections, the DAW editions of Michael Moorcock's Elric of Melniboné books, numerous DAW editions of C. His paintings have appeared on the covers of more than 350 books and magazines, including many Stephen King novels, most of the Del Rey editions of Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern series, Piers Anthony's Incarnations of Immortality series, the Del Rey edition of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mars series, Melanie Rawn's Dragon Prince and Dragon Star series, the Del Rey editions of H. His work was a dominant force in the transition of genre book covers away from the surrealism introduced in the 1950s and 1960s back to realism. Michael Whelan is one of the most important contemporary science fiction and fantasy artists, and certainly the most popular.

The Science Fiction Hall of Fame inducted Whelan in June 2009, the first living artist so honored.

Michael Whelan's Works of Wonder by Michael Whelan