About the Author

David B. Mattingly lives in Hoboken, New Jersey, right across the Hudson River from New York City. He teaches matte painting at the School of Visual Arts and at Pratt Institute. He has worked on major motion pictures and TV miniseries for the last 30 years, including The Black Hole (1979), Tron (1982), Dick Tracy (1990), The Stand (1994), I, Robot (2004), and A Muppets Christmas: Letters to Santa (2008). He has contributed matte shots and special effects to hundreds of commercial projects.

David worked at Walt Disney Studios for seven years in the 1980s and became head of the matte department in 1984. He moved to New York City in the late 1980s to pursue a career as a book illustrator.

David has produced more than 1,200 covers for major publishers of science fiction and fantasy, including Baen, Bantam, DAW, Del Rey, Dell, Marvel, Omni, Playboy, Signet, and Tor. For Scholastic Inc., David painted 54 covers for K. A. Applegate’s blockbuster young adult series Animorphs and Everworld. He illustrated David Weber’s space epic Honor Harrington, a New York Times best-seller. A compilation of his traditionally painted artwork, Alternate Views, Alternate Universes: The Art of David B. Mattingly was published in 1996.

David is a two-time winner of the Magazine and Booksellers “Best Cover of the Year” award, and he is also the winner of the Association of Science Fiction Artists “Chesley” award. David’s other clients have included Michael Jackson, Lucasfilm, Universal Studios, Totco Oil, Galloob Toys, R/Greenberg Associates, Click 3X, and Spontaneous Combustion.