Mark Zug

Artist Mark Zug got his start attending Pennsylvania School of Art & Design, where he was introduced to work of N.C. Wyeth, Howard Pyle, J. C. Leyendecker and other painters of the American Golden Age of illustration. The illustrator Ken Laager, who as guest lecturer had displayed the Brandywine artists to the class, accepted Zug as an apprentice/ghost painter after art school. Zug worked on his portfolio for another five hears while working as a CNC machinist, penciling historical comic strips for cartoonist Pat Reynolds, and assisting painting western novel covers for Ken Laager. In 1992 he got a contract with Byron Preiss Visual Publications to illustrate I Robot: The Illustrated Screenplay by Harlan Ellison, which enabled him to quit all other work and focus on life as a freelance illustrator. Byron Preiss also tasked Zug with adapting I, Robot into graphic novel form, an unpublished project for which he nevertheless completed over 150 painted pages. Afterwards, he moved on to gaming art with the collectible card game Dune by Last Unicorn, which tapped into his long-standing love of that Frank Herbert masterpiece. From there he expanded into the gaming brands Shadowrun, Battletech, Magic: The Gathering and World of Warcraft. He obtained commissions for book covers, his artwork appearing on titles by Tanith Lee, Diana Wynne-Jones, Timothy Zahn, Peter David, those of the fantasy fiction imprints Eberron and Forgotten Realms, the magazines Popular Science, Dragon, Dungeon, Duelist, Inquest, Star Wars Gamer; the Dark Horse comic of Star Wars, to name a few. He illustrated frontispieces of the prestigious Easton Press leather-bound science fiction classics. In more recent years he has become the illustrator for the best-selling Septimus Heap and TodHunter Moon series of fantasy novels by Angie Sage, providing both cover designs and interior drawings. He also entertains many private commissions which continue to enable him to exercise his more unfettered side, after the fashion of his self-commissioned "Noble Gases" series of paintings, and his pair of alternate-Middle-Earth paintings. He has in recent years returned to his beloved graphic novel medium with his own as-yet-unannounced and self-authored comic series. He invites all to visit www.markzug.com with eternal wishes of peace and a great view.