James Fenner

James Fenner is an illustrator living in Portland, Oregon, originally from the shores of Lake Huron in Michigan. He works in editorial illustration, book covers, graphic novels and animated illustration, and he is frank about wanting more time for personal graphic-novel pages. Nature is the usual weather in the pictures. Graphite and ink come first; colour arrives digitally, often with a watercolor softness and a cross-hatched grain you can still read as a hand.

His own site keeps a working client list rather than a myth. For Wizards of the Coast he drew illustrations for Ravenloft: The Horrors Within. For DAW Books he made covers for John Wiswell’s Someone You Can Build a Nest In and The Dragon Has Some Complaints. He contributed major-arcana pictures to Critical Role’s ten-year anniversary tarot, and further art for the Midst podcast. Simon & Schuster commissioned covers for Slice of Cherry and How to Survive Camping. There is campaign art for Honkai: Star Rail’s Honkai Fairytales, a piece for Reactor/TOR on P. H. Lee’s The V*mpire, colouring for Boom! Studios (including The Sacrifice of Darkness and a Mighty Morphin Power Rangers × Usagi Yojimbo issue), and cover and interior work for Hachette titles We Mostly Come Out at Night and Queer Mythology. Album and tour pictures include James Marriott, half·alive, and Dabin with William Black. Society of Illustrators 65 selected These Hollow Hills.

The Music, profiling him in Oregon, put the method in one sentence: graphite drawings merged with digital colour, landscapes and figures in slightly unreal rooms, a background in animation and conceptual art. Later personal sheets such as Memory Trail (ink, graphite and digital, 2024) keep that stack. He also made illustrations for Mighty Oak Animation’s Only Murders in the Building short, a film that went on to win a Shorty Award — his name on the pictures, not a claim that the trophy is his. The brief, from his own about page, is still the right one: if a project would look well in this style, write. The woods are open.