Tommy Arnold
In this interview, we got to spend time picking the brain of Tommy Arnold, discussing his artistic journey, the influences that shape his work, and the process he brings to each illustration. His compositions bring richly detailed characters to life and his ability to capture movement and mood (always with a healthy dose of cool) is rarely matched. Tommy's art has been featured in the realms of fantasy and sci-fi limited edition and trade books and he has contributed concept art to AAA video game titles, Magic: The Gathering and has recently devoted his time to realizing the world of Murderbot that is coming to Apple TV in the near future. Even if you don't think you know his work, you probably have seen it, as he has been helping bring imaginative worlds to life in many different mediums throughout his career. I hope you enjoy this interview as we talk about his path to becoming an artist, some of his most iconic work, concept art vs. book illustration, working with Curious King on The Blade Itself and how he manages to create some of the most striking illustrations in speculative fiction.
Q: You haven’t had the most conventional start to being a full-time artist, as it was really much later in life that you realized you were drawn to being an illustrator as a career. Were there any early formative experiences that point towards this and who were the major influences in your life in this area?
I don't know that there is a traditional path really. I’ve talked to a few illustrators who knew that’s what they wanted to do from when they were really young. If you start that path with “I went to a college” then it's about the same as me. I went to a college that didn't have a great art program but they were accepting of their limitations and they didn't hold me back, which I think was the biggest thing for me. A lot of schools, if the teachers have their own limitations, then they get passed on to the students as taboos, and that wasn't the case for me. My teachers didn’t fully understand what I was trying to do, but they still encouraged me to do my own thing and loved what I was doing.
After that, I found a small trade school in Atlanta, which I don't even think exists anymore. It was called the Portfolio Center and it was mostly graphic design, but they had a small illustration program of around eight students and three teachers.
One of those teachers was Brian Stelfreeze, a comic book artist, and he gave me the bones, the foundation of everything that I could have gotten if I had been casually going at it for a much longer period of time, starting in high school or some much earlier period, and following through all the way into college and beyond. He told me that I could learn everything I needed through a high-powered injection of ideas over nine months and that is exactly what happened. I think I tried to quit multiple times during those nine months and he would always say, no, you're really close. It’s a very motivating position, to be told by a professional that you're really close. I really did get lucky that I just had this one guru that worked out for me, because it's hard for me to put my trust in somebody, but once I do, I'm going to listen to that person. So, he kept me on the path until the path was solid enough to keep me on it.
And after those nine months, I got a job working on an animated TV show and I dropped out of school, but Brian and I have stayed close to this day. In fact, just in October of 2023, he officiated my wedding, which was really cool for us.
Q: So, you end up leaving school and start pursuing freelance work out in the wider world. How did you go about looking for work and what opportunities came across your path?
A lot of the time this stuff just falls on you rather than you looking for it. I had started to read through a rather large blog called Muddy Colors. A working illustrator would do a post about the craft every day and I had stumbled across this at one point and then I was reading it daily with my coffee. I'm kind of a fanatic, so I went back and read about three articles a day. I started from the inception of the blog and I read up to the current article and then kept going when new ones released. Later, I even wrote for the site, and a lot of those collaborators for the blog did the kind of work that I wanted to do and ended up doing shortly thereafter.
I had dreamed of being in the world of concept art for films, shows, and video games, but those jobs are incredibly demanding of your skillset in a way that I wasn't ready for yet, and it was hard to find solid education supporting that path. There weren't really many schools for concept art back then (I would have gone to one of them if there were), but there was one workshop in California called the Gnomon Workshop, which eventually turned into a full school. One of the recruiters looked at my portfolio and was like, “We can put you on the 3D track, and get you working within around two or three years, but this current stuff really isn’t great.” They were pretty down on it.
And this was around the same time I met Brian and he said, “I see exactly what you want to do and you can do it, but you don't have what you need yet.” It was such a different emotional resonance to that of the Gnomon recruiter so I decided to go with the person who believed in me. I always had this far-reaching goal of working on concepts and working in entertainment, but I needed to learn some things in the meantime and a place to practice my skills. I suppose the goal is you want to get to the point that you're getting paid to study art as fast as possible rather than paying to study art.
When trying to get my first job with an animation studio that did incredibly stylized shows, I remember they gave me an art test, not to find out if I could draw well enough to join the show, but to find out if I could draw badly enough to join the show. They said my portfolio was nice, but it was primarily landscapes, which was a lot of what I painted at the time, because they don't require a ton of difficult drawing. They actually wanted me to take some of their illustrations and imitate their style - which was way dialed back from the “realism” I’d been attempting and gave me 24 hours. I finished in a little over two hours and then I spent another 14 hours staring at it thinking, is this what they need?
And you know, then they gave me a job offer about five minutes after I turned it in.
Q: Early on you set your sights specifically on Tor and tried to get an interview with Irene Gallo, who was their Head of the Art Department and Vice President of Tordotcom. What drove you towards this and how did you end up making that connection?
It was simple, they were very visible at the time. At the time, Irene Gallo, the creative director at Tor who started up the tordotcom and publishing imprints, was very vocal in the community. I didn't really know what I was looking for but was lucky enough to connect with her and she was part of a group that was almost like a secret cabal. A cabal, which by chance was also very open in reality, and was filled with art directors and illustrators, and they ran this program called the Illustrated Illustration Masterclass. There was a lot of collaboration and they had podcasts where they were on each other's shows and they produced so much incredibly valuable content. They helped me understand what they (these Art Directors) were looking for, how to make it, who to show it to, and all sorts of valuable things in the industry.
A lot of the jobs I do now I either knew I wasn't qualified for then or didn't know they existed yet, but I still went for it. I think all artists, when they're getting started, think that they'll be quite stylish or bring something new, but they don't realize that it's such an old game at this point. My early work is very stylish and lacks a lot of what I think makes it good now, but I’ve learned a ton over time and the style falls away as the skills get filled in. Honestly, now I’m working hard to bring a little pizazz - a little style - back into the work. It probably goes in cycles like that.
Anyways, Irene was hiring work that looked very cool to me and she was known amongst the illustrators I knew as someone who gave you a lot of freedom, but also a lot of responsibility. She didn’t micromanage, and basically gave us freedom, but if I wasn’t doing it right, I would know and then I’d have to do it again. That happened to me multiple times, but it was a great learning experience. They were very straightforward, difficult as it always is in the moment. You learn a lot when you work with Tor.
Q: The vast majority of your work is done digitally and is your favored medium. How did you find this as your chosen medium for creating your art? Is there a particular physical medium you are trying to approximate when doing digital art or do you think it is simply a form in and of itself?
Yeah, I did it backwards. I actually started digitally. I think more and more people in my generation of artists are like that now. I played Magic: The Gathering as a kid…a lot. I would compete in the Junior Super Series for 16 and under and then they changed it to 18 and under and I would play in the national championships of that almost every year. It was just what me and all my friends did. So, I was just slowly getting exposed to more and more fantasy art and not really considering how it was molding me as a person. I was just doing what I thought was fun.
When I went to college, I just wanted to major in something fun. I didn't really know what to do. I took an art class because it was a liberal arts college and I kind of had to. I loved art, but in the back of my head, I knew you weren’t supposed to major in art. And I had this one friend, an older girl, (that I had a massive crush on) and she had a lot of sway with me and she just said why not? I said, “Well, you know you don't make any money.” She said, “Who says you can’t, maybe you could?” She was like, “Have you ever heard of Banksy?” He was just starting to be known at the time, particularly among college students. And so, I was like, “okay, well, I don't really know if Banksy makes any money, but it's a fair point.”
I started looking around at Magic card illustrators and there had been this one illustrator whose lands I'd always played in my decks and it was John Avon. I looked on his website and realized he'd been one of my favorite artists for years without my realizing it. I emailed him and he emailed me back and said he worked digitally and gave me instruction on it. He basically said, here is the technology, here are the specs your computer needs, good luck with it. I don't even think he looked at my site, but it was a very kind answer. I sometimes get emails like this from time to time now and I don't answer all of them, but if it's a good one I'll answer, because I do have a bit of a chip on my shoulder about it and because nobody gets where I’m at without quite a bit of help.
This was right before my 21st birthday and I remember my dad and I were supposed to go to Vegas to celebrate. It was supposed to be this big thing and we didn't have a ton of resources at the time. He had a work trip scheduled there and was going to pay for a two-connection flight for me to get there and join him. It was incredibly wonderful and generous, but I said to him, I don't need that for my future, but I do need this drawing tablet that this stranger that I adore has told me I need for my career. To my dad’s credit, he said ok, that sounds awesome, and if you feel that way about it we can get it for you instead of the Vegas thing. I was the only one in our school who had one of these. My classmates didn't even know you could paint digitally until I bought it in and I kept it under lock and key outside the computer lab.
It’s taken me awhile, but I've started to accept that I'm just a computer drawer. Even in the real world, I have to draw like I'm drawing on a computer because the marks are so different and it just kind of works for me, but I don't think it would necessarily work for everyone.
In terms of the digital medium, I've always been a big proponent of the idea that it's its own thing. It has a lot of powers that no other medium has and it has some restrictions and problems that no other medium has. I think it can let you appear to be good faster than any other medium and it can keep you from actually getting good for longer than any other medium because you have so much ability to fix your mistakes. If you're working in ink or watercolor and you mess up you have to start over. You really have to learn to be accurate fast, because you will mess up one little thing and boom, you’ve wasted like eight hours. You waste time drawing digitally in really different ways. You can think you're making it better for eight hours and really, it's unsalvageable and you would be better off just restarting. So, the emotional control takes a lot longer to learn.
I always sort of thought it was bizarre to try and emulate other mediums with digital because if that’s what you want to do then it's just faster to do it traditionally. All my favorite artists at the time were digital, and most of them were either Magic or book illustrators, or some of them were concept artists that I got exposed to later. But the thing is, traditional media and everything in the physical world does have a huge advantage. Sculptors get this advantage, in that the world is just lush with texture. There's texture everywhere, and for a lot of younger painters, it takes them a while to grasp that the density of information in the picture and the correctness of information, are the two things that really confer realism. You have to find ways in the computer to impart that gritty and realistic texture. If you can't, then the paintings always have this stylized feeling, because when we look around the world, we're just inundated with texture everywhere, and so we can't really escape it as artists.
In terms of other mediums, I also oil paint. That's kind of been an on-and-off hobby over the last ten years and I've worked to some degree with pretty much every other medium. But I need things that are very flexible. Again, because of that sort of digital affect that I have, I expect things to be highly editable. I don't mess with acrylic or watercolor, where you have to get it right the first time and you cannot change it, because that requires two different things I don't have. One is exactitude and the other is patience.
Q: There is a unique aspect of being primarily a digital artist and that is that you don’t have the fallback of selling originals. Of course, you can do signed limited prints and such, but for many artists that use oils or pen-and-ink, a major source of revenue is the sale of the originals, even more so than the actual commission for the pieces that will be included in a book or on a card. Does this make it less attractive for digital artists to do these kinds of projects and how does that factor into your mental calculus as you are looking at work?
I think that’s a fabulous question, because I think a lot of people are afraid to ask these kinds of questions of artists. If you let it be part of the calculus as a digital artist, you're usually making a bit of a mistake. And to highlight that, some artists are really adaptable and they don't care, they can work in any medium, especially when they've grown up as artists and did oil painting in college. You know, all the stuff that I never did and have had to learn later in an environment that was probably more effective but less guided. I’m thinking of someone like Victor Adame Minguez.
Now, I don’t know anything about Victor’s background, but Victor is a fabulous artist who works a lot on Magic: The Gathering and other properties. As the player base and market for original art expanded and the game was bought by Hasbro, the collectability of the original oil paintings just went through the roof. I remember seeing the Arcbound Ravager original painting (and that set came out around 2012), and the original painting went for like $60,000 and a bunch of artists just said, “I'll just paint with oil, I don't care.” Victor did this as well and you had to really respect it, because at first the quality of the paintings went down a bit, but he obviously worked hard at it and pretty quickly the quality was as good or better than it had ever been, and that's so impressive. Now there are auctions where artists are selling paintings for $30,000 or $50,000 or some crazy number, especially if it's a good card, and so that calculus can be in there. Some of the most notorious sort of OG's of the field, someone like Donato Giancola can sell originals for so much money.
One of the things I love about when I'm oil painting is that it doesn't have any outside pressures or problem-solving pressure on it. I guess the best way to put it is I'm a purist at heart. I don't like crossing the channels. With fine art (I don't even call it that when I'm painting for myself), I like that anything could happen. It's a whole different thought process. I won't even commit the modern faux pas of comparing it to meditation, but it's just different and that's very enjoyable.
So, whenever I've thought, “I should take this commission because hmm it doesn't pay very well, but I bet I could sell prints of it,” it turns out to be self-sabotage because the whole time you know you're getting underpaid for the illustration and that you’re altering the work for the hope of selling prints of it or whatever, and also other things that do pay a good rate are competing for your time.
In art, there is so much room at the top. People have been a little afraid about that because of AI, it seems like, but there's pretty much a whole world of artists that are pretty good, but that you could switch out with each other. And then there's the people that are always busy, and the people that are always busy: there's not enough of them to do all the work. That's why they're always busy. The supply and demand just don't add up, because what separates the pretty good from the really competent artists is a fair amount of effort and time you have to spend on your own, and it's a type of effort that's a little bit anathema to our modern culture. You don't get Instagram likes for sitting alone in a room drawing naked people off your computer, or a cube with different kinds of lights shining on it for months. You can't even make a video of you doing that look cool. So, you have to do a lot of internal work and work that nobody sees to get to that level. And that results in you being able to get a good rate for your time up front, rather than having to gamble that you can make some more off the long tail of an illustration job.
Q: As your career has grown and the breadth of your work expanded, how do you go about choosing your future projects? Are you having to be more selective with what you are taking on and are there ever specific works you actually seek out to illustrate?
I'm still a bit of a mercenary, honestly. My goal with art is always to push and expand what I'm capable of. My big core belief is in human ability and that it can be expanded and grown and that it can be cultivated. I think a lot of people can do much more than what they think they're capable of. I was really lucky to have people around me most of my life who believed in me and thought I could do whatever I wanted.
Everything in my life is pretty much geared towards: how can I perform better as an artist, learn new skills, and execute on that. Generally, I’ll work for whoever is paying the most and is providing the most extra time and space for that to occur. It’s a balance of financial interest and genuine non-financial interest. Also, there is the cool factor, like Magic: The Gathering is doing these crossover sets now, with IPs like Final Fantasy or Doctor Who, but I don’t work for them much anymore because the rates and flexibility don’t often provide what I’m looking for. Also, since I'm not a traditional artist, I can't sell on the back end, which is a lot of how they justify keeping the rates low. More recently, they said they had a Marvel set coming up and would let me pick the characters I wanted, so I was in. I can't say who it is specifically, but there are certain Marvel characters that I’ve been watching since I was a kid in the 90s. I'm going to paint those characters and regardless of what I get paid, I'll justify it because it’s just going to be fun for me.
Recently, I was doing a job negotiation with a company on doing the cover art for a big video game release, but they didn’t want to pay the same rate that we had used in the past. They were a little tight on money on this project and normally the contract is written to say that I can't show the work I do for them. This time though, I said if they wanted me to come down on the rate, they would need to allow me to show this publicly later, (which has a huge marketing value to me because it's a game that millions of people play), and be able to go, “Hey, I did this.” So, they agreed and we got it approved that way.
Q: You have been commissioned for projects of varying scale, from major releases with Orbit and Tor (The Witcher, The Locked Tomb) to very limited fine press projects. Do you find that these projects differ significantly as the size of the project increases or decreases or is your approach the same?
That field is very flexible, and it rewards good thinking, not rule-following, which is one of the things I love about it. I'm sure some of my art directors don't always love that, because I can play it pretty loose. Sometimes you can’t predict what jobs are going to be big though, like with Locked Tomb, I really didn't know it was going to be a thing, but I think Tor knew. There is a lot more at stake with the art for a book the publisher expects it to be big than when it's expected not to be. Sometimes you can tell they don’t care and you have a lot more freedom with that kind of job and just swing for the fences, maybe you hit a home run and maybe you miss.
Gideon the Ninth was an interesting one though because I came in not knowing what to expect. I'd worked on a few projects with Tor at this point that they thought were going to be big. Some of them were and some of them weren't. Sometimes it came down to who the author was, other times it came down to placement and marketing. They always seemed to like my covers, but with the Locked Tomb, they wanted a portrait. It was supposed to be a portrait cover of Gideon in sunglasses. There are sketches for that out there somewhere. I had read the whole book because it's such a fun read. I had this image in my head from near the end of the book where there's this big fight going on and Gideon gets tossed her sword while she's walking through a storm of bones. The sword that's on the cover is not the sword that's in that scene, because in the book she gets tossed her two-hander, but I just thought it was cool as shit. I'd done that sketch and they liked it, but still asked me to do some more versions of the portrait, so I did. After a couple more rounds of portraits, they said that much to their chagrin, they felt the portraits weren’t standing up to the walking shot and so could I just paint that one. But, they said, “Make sure it stays this good and don't make us regret this.”
Q: I’ve heard you talk about the idea of something being “Cool” as being a legitimate end to art. Can you expand on that a little bit more and why that applies to the forms of art that you most frequently get hired for?
I don't know if that was an actual realization, that makes it sound more profound than it probably was for me. I think I've just always been someone who's excitable. When I saw The Matrix, I didn't go buy a trench coat, but I watched The Matrix every day after school on repeat for four to five hours for probably two years. So, I've seen The Matrix hundreds and hundreds, maybe even a thousand times at this point. If I like something, I'll just return to it over and over again, and I still get that little hit of cool every time.
When you are working on a new piece, the important thing, and this goes back to the quality that I mentioned, is when you're making a piece of art, you have to be two people at once. You are an artist who's sitting there scribbling and you are a viewer who's standing over that artist's shoulder. When you get that feeling that something is great, stop. As the art director on your own shoulder, you just have to obey that feeling. You have to accept that something genuine was triggered in yourself and that's going to be something special. A lot of artists will have self-doubt around this. You can never know what anybody else is going to think and this bears out in every part of life. But the way to have solace is to do what you think is correct or right, and for me it was correct or right for it to be cool.
If I look at how those pieces that I think are cool are received, I can tell people kind of feel it. If I can’t get excited while creating it and think that it's dope, then no one else is going to think that either. We also have such a quick and obvious way to find that out now, which is, do people smash the like button?
With books especially, but I think with any source material, you are not really in any way in a position of authorship. I think it was Mondrian, the guy who's done all the blue, red and yellow squares with black lines. He said the position of the artist is simple. He is essentially a channel. And I love that idea. So, I’m not trying to supplant the author. The author wrote this awesome piece and there are people who love the work because of big reveals or their writing style and that’s great; that’s as it should be. I’m just trying to channel cool.
Q: Our readers will recognize your work from the projects you have done with small press publishers. How did you originally get connected with Anthony (Curious King) for The Blade Itself and do you enjoy working on this kind of project?
Overall, it was great. There's a lot more to it to pull off these kinds of super high-end books than it might seem, and Anthony was clearly shooting for something very high-end. If somebody comes at you with a job and you have nothing but higher-paying jobs than that, you want to say no. But you're also in this position when you're a freelancer, so you don't always have to take the highest paying jobs.
I talk with my wife and my friends and other artists about this stuff all the time. A lot of them all are in the art world and so we are fortunate to have this group dialogue and there is a general consensus that illustrated books are a hard thing to make work financially. You typically do get more artistic freedom and they can help shift the look of your portfolio, which gives you a little more control. Generally, the more someone pays, the less creative freedom you have.
Anthony wasn’t the first one to reach out from the small press world, but he was one of the few who seemed really serious and was offering the money to back it up. Overall, the project was hard because the contract was so long and I was constantly being presented with shorter and higher paying contracts, so Anthony and I ran into that a couple of times where it was hard for me to regulate my schedule. He was incredibly patient with me, but I was also dealing with an injury during that time which really exacerbated this issue. My physical body has always been one of my biggest impediments. It took me so long to appreciate my physical body as a real instrument. It's not my pencils, it's not the computer. All that stuff is pretty crude compared to my body and my mind. I just wasn't supporting them the way that they needed. So, this project was during the end of me actually figuring that out and really getting where I needed to be physically, my mood, diet, all of it.
Anthony had high expectations, which I'm not afraid of, and I've been working as an artist who gets commissioned and receives feedback for long enough that if someone wants to collaborate at that level, then I’m in for it. He had a lot of opinions and ideas and he wasn't shy about expressing them. You know, we did more sketches for that book than I've ever done for any illustrated book. Maybe more than I've ever done for anything that wasn't like a AAA video game release. I will say he definitely got the better end of the deal. I didn't make my hourly on that job for sure, but I knew what I was getting into and we just decided to toss out the contract. I told him I could sign a contract if he wanted, but he said no and that he didn’t really need it. At that point we just decided, let’s make a great book.
So, we got Joe involved and we got to do group Zoom meetings and I would watch them respond to the pieces live. There were even one or two pieces that got done without a sketch. When it came to the cover, I presented two or three options and he said he didn’t want to go with any of them as they were. He picked one as a base and said he wanted me to go crazy with it. I was very happy about that because, honestly, you don't really know what a client's limits are until they tell you. And it turned out he had none. He was not weirded out by anything. He said, “that's a great Bloody Nine. But it would be even better if you blackened his eye and broke his nose and dislocated his zygomatic bone and make sure he’s got stubble.” I was just like “Okay, here we go!”
I was going crazy on that and I pulled up all this reference of MMA fighters with broken and shattered noses. If someone had walked in the room when I was working on this, they would have thought I'm a messed-up guy, but it paid off really nicely with that level of high collaboration. If the client is going for it, if you're swinging for the fences, you get home runs or you get misses, and we got mostly home runs in the book and that is a testament to two things, mostly Anthony's patience and his collaborative intensity. I'm someone that's always looking for a challenge and this was a challenging job. It was a decathlon sort of job.
Q: When you are asked to do an illustration for a particular work, especially when you aren’t familiar with that work, what is your preparation process? Do you feel like an artistic collaborator with the press that is hiring you or does it feel more like being hired for a job?
I read a lot, but I'm a mostly a nonfiction reader because I'm always reading things that are designed to figure out how can I get better at a particular skill set or solve a problem. Most of my fiction reading over the past decade has come from assignments. Early on it was more mixed, sometimes I would get a full book and sometimes it would just be a brief. A lot of art directors at the bigger houses want to give you a brief because they've already figured it out, they've gotten it approved by sales, and your job is to execute on that vision, and that can be really fun. In fact, there's something very pleasing about a linear process where they don't jerk you around and they know what they want. They know what they want and can express it, so you can give it to them and everybody knows whether you have failed or succeeded.
This again sounds so mercenary, but over time you realize if you get offered something and you’ve heard of it, it's probably good. If you get offered something and you've never heard of it, as someone that's got a foot in that world but doesn't read a ton of this kind of fiction, then you have to think about it a little more. I know some comic book readers who say that if you're going to be a real comic fan, you have to read all the crap as well as all the good stuff, “because I read all this crap when I was a kid and you have to go through that too.” That doesn’t make sense to me at all. I'll say I'm pretty selective, and with a self-published author these days I will evaluate it and if the book isn't good, I won't do it. If the book is good, I'll do it. It's as simple as that. It's not like I don't take self-published jobs. I've done tons of them. But the same thing is true with published work now, and if it's not good, it's hard to connect to. Sometimes you might not fully know till you've taken the job.
When I agreed to do the Murderbot books for Subterranean Press, I hadn’t read them, but they were famous, so I thought, “How bad could they actually be?”
I loved them, absolutely loved them. Me and my wife have read them all multiple times. We read them as bedtime stories. I read them out loud to her, doing voices for Art and a bunch of different characters. But you don't always know that going in. Sometimes you get one and you realize that it’s basically just someone's D&D campaign and I’m sitting there thinking, “What am I supposed to do with this?” Sometimes there isn’t anything obvious for you to channel and at that point you just have to find a way. You find a glimmer of something that you can be a channel for. Maybe it’s a fight that actually wasn’t shown. They didn't even really talk about it, but it was implied and I run with that and find my own inspiration from another source and use that.
Q: If you could pick one piece of literature to illustrate that you think would fit well with your style, what would that be? Why?
Ender's Game. I've said that to every publisher I've worked with and none of them have yet taken me up on it. But I would do it for a very reasonable rate and I would go ballistic on it. I would need two years. Someone would have to give me decent pay in two years, but because the pay would just be a token of the effort, I would spend on it, no one could pay me enough for the effort I would spend on it, which is why I would need a long time, because that would be my hobby for like two years. I could do a two-book set in two years actually, because once I get into that headspace and I'm there, I’d love to do Speaker for the Dead as well. It’s a very hard book to capture because the whole book happens inside a little boy's head, but it's incredible. That's been my dream job since I read that book when I was 10 or 11. I think a lot of my beliefs about trying to become great at something came from that, trying to work hard on something, and the belief that you can do it even though it might seem intense or overbearing when the world is collapsing in. Even when you’ve used all your fucking energy, you can give it your all for one more day. You can come up with a creative solution. It's all in that book and it had a big impact on me. I had read the book in paperback tons of times as a kid. It was one of those things I would return to every year just to experience it again.
Q: We know you are working on a few projects for the publishers mentioned above, but is there anything else you can tell us about that is on the horizon? Are there any personal or commissioned projects you can talk about in their earlier stages?
Outside of the book publishing world, there have also been some video games I have worked on. I worked on a couple NDA projects I'm not allowed to talk about specifically, but I can say they were platform, exclusive AAA titles that were some of the bestselling of the last year and that I helped design the covers. I was very fortunate to get to work with very experienced professionals in a small capacity on helping execute these projects and that was really fun.
The lack of being able to talk about it is a bummer with the kind of stuff I do. Another project that I'm allowed to talk about now because the show has been announced, is that I'm doing the concept art and design for the Apple TV adaptation of Murderbot. I haven't actually posted about that much or talked about it, so I don't think anybody really knows that I'm working on it or have worked on it, but I can't wait to see it and see the finished product. When the Costume Designer sends me a final photo of the suit on the actor, I'll just lose my mind probably. I honestly don't know exactly what it will feel like, but I am excited for it. And also, I’m just so excited for Martha (Wells).
It's such a fabulous series and Martha was the one that recommended me to work on the show. I had a great time talking with her when I did the Subterranean Press editions and I guess she mentioned to the director that I was the guy that did covers he liked, so that was how I got offered the job. I know that Jamie Jones, who did the original trade covers, also got offered to work on it. He was too busy on another show, but it was cool that they tried to bring on the book illustrators for the show concept art. That is kind of special for me too, because Jaime is someone I’ve looked up to for years and finally got the nerve to email him a couple years ago and asked if he could do a portfolio review and give me some pointers and answer a few questions. When I got Murderbot he really helped me process it and guided me through it.
It's been a long arc to get to this point because the skill set needed for concept art is completely different than with books. With a book you might have a month or two to turn in some sketches, and then you get feedback and do a final. With a show, it is full speed on the very first day. Right off the bat, they had me paint the suit, and said “show it to us tomorrow and we will meet every day.” This is totally normal for concept artists and it might sound like I’m being a baby, but for me it was a bit of an adjustment period coming from publishing, especially being a pretty introverted guy. It was 9 am every morning for a one-on-one, and I had to show them everything I did, it was the ultimate accountability. If you don't paint, they will know, and if it's not cool or interesting, they will make you start over. I worked with them from the very earliest stages, when there were only one or two episodes written, all the way to when it was green lit and handed off to costumes.
Q: Will those of us who know the covers from Subterranean Press recognize the suit from your work on those or were there major modifications from your original concepts of it?
I'd love to show you all the sketches. I will be able to show some of them once the pictures are out and more has been released about the show. I will say that the place we started was similar to the Subterranean Press cover, all in white. At the time it was only Paul (Weitz) and not Chris (Weitz), the two brothers that are the writers and show runners, and he just wanted to know about me, which I thought was really cool. He asked about my process and art and then about seven minutes into the meeting he was like, “All right, we like the suit that you did, but it looks a little sportier and Tron-like than we were hoping, so let’s make some adjustments” and that was the end of the meeting.
As I mentioned, I'm someone that does like to do a lot of free research and pre-reading and I had spent a lot of time with the source material on this one because of my work with Sub Press. I had read all the books multiple times because I had illustrated them already. I knew from the start what made Murderbot so cool and I knew what the suit needed to do. Not only that, but I knew what it needed to do six books down the road, so we could anticipate that from the start and how the functions of the suit would be revealed over time. I knew that there would be scenes where Murderbot was in the skin suit, which doesn't involve the outer armor. I knew that there would be the outer armor and all the different ways that the helmet would work and that Murderbot’s suit would need pockets for the weapons since Martha had written it all throughout the series.
When you are working on a static illustration my main concern is that it has to be cool or give a strong feeling, but the character doesn’t actually walk around in that armor. The principal design characteristic of working in film, and this doesn't even apply in games really, is that it has to work, it has to move, and I learned a lot about that on this job. Coming in, I had some ideas about what the restrictions and limitations would be. The Costume Designers I worked with were very giving of their time to show me where it could be improved and what wasn't going to work practically. So, they're building it right now, and it’s really exciting for me, because I got to draw it, come up with the basic idea, then I got to refine it.
At the time I got the job, I'd been doing the research to get into concept art for maybe two to three years at that point and was advertising myself as a concept artist and I guess they believed it. At that point, I had to be able to do it and luckily all that research and effort paid off and now I'm just like a kid in a candy store.
This interview was done over Zoom between Zach and Tommy then transcribed into written form. We want to thank Tommy Arnold for his willingness to be a part of this series amidst his extremely busy schedule. If you want to check out a selection of Tommy's past projects, you can take a look at his portfolio on his website. For updates on new and upcoming work from him, you can follow him on Instagram or on X.
Interview by: Zach Harney of the Collectible Book Vault
Congrats to the winners of our Tommy Arnold giveaway:
Nate Zelk - The Blade Itself
Jennifer Cohen - Gideon
Thank you everyone for reading the interview and all the feedback, I know Tommy appreciates it!
Thanks for the great interview. I love a great book cover, but I never really considered looking into who the artist was until I came across Tommy's work. Now I follow several other cover artists as well!
Love the interview! I really enjoy following along with the art, so hearing the story behind some of it was great.
Absolutely love Tommy’s work! Thanks for a great interview 💖
I am so excited to hear that Tommy worked on the Muderbot show! Great interview!