Douglas Smith

About Douglas Smith

Douglas Smith is an American illustrator, born in New York City, who works in scratchboard and is best known for the cover and interior art of Gregory Maguire's Wicked (1995) and the later novels in that sequence.

Smith took a BFA in Illustration at the Rhode Island School of Design in 1974, where he also studied sculpture, painting and printmaking. He then moved to Boston and built a freelance practice drawing for the Boston Globe, Boston Magazine and other local titles, and was profiled in Communication Arts in 1986. His clients have since included The New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, National Geographic, Smithsonian, Penguin Random House and the US Postal Service, and he produced work for Greenpeace, including an anti-whaling children's book. He is represented by the Richard Solomon agency and moved to Peaks Island, Maine, in 2004.

His method is to make a tight drawing on vellum, transfer it to black scratchboard and engrave the image, giving a finish related to pen and ink. For colour pieces he paints a same-size print of the engraving in watercolour. For Maguire he designed a run of jackets in a "keyhole" format, where a cut-out shows part of the image and opening the jacket reveals the rest.

For collectors

The ReganBooks first edition of Wicked (New York, 1995) has colour pictorial boards, pictorial map endpapers, an illustrated title page and five full-page illustrations credited to Smith, in a pictorial jacket. Books of Wonder has listed a fine first edition signed by Maguire (price-clipped jacket) at $2,000.