EXTRACTS: Illustrators issue 8 © 2014 The Book Palace (96 PAGES in Full edition)

4 touting for work, I don’t think I’d have lasted long. My first published work was a painting of a lizard in a cracked skull and was used on a book called ‘Satanic Omnibus’. It was later re-used on an edition of ‘Demons by Daylight’ by Ramsey Campbell. JM: Was your artwork published in magazines more than as book covers, or was it the other way around? LE: By far the majority of jobs were for book jackets, but there were occasional magazine illustrations. I found myself doing regular paintings for Men Only and Club International magazines at one point, which was a pleasant change. It was difficult to do both books and magazines because they worked to different timetables. If you are booked up with covers for nine months then it’s tricky to fit in a magazine job, which might need turning around in two weeks. JM: At what point did you start thinking, this could be a career? LE: I never really thought about it being a career. As long as the work kept coming in I was pleased to do it. Then you find that twenty years have passed and people are talking about your “career as an illustrator” and you wonder ABOVE & RIGHT: One of Edward’s earliest commissions for the popular ‘Fontana Book of Horror Stories’ series. As the artist says; “This was one of my early oil paintings, and it suffered rather from my over enthusiastic use of varnish. Lesson learned.” FACING PAGE: ‘Mrs. Cake Suspects a Psychic Perturbation’. Illustration for the 2009 Terry Pratchett Discworld Calendar. This series has provided the artist with some of his most enjoyable commissions as this image from ‘Reaper Man’ reveals.