Betsy Marsch – Designer

As a professional fine artist specializing in portrait and figure painting, I can create traditional works as well as unique contemporary art on my experimental media of reacted copper panels. I create book cover paintings to bring your characters to life, as well as interior illustrations in pen, pencil, and watercolor to manifest your creative vision.My unique aesthetic comes from working with copper as a substrate, reacting it to create rich crystalline patterns of blue, green, and bronze, which form the basis for abstract and figural artwork. But I am trained in a broad range of painting styles and media, enabling me to craft artwork that fits your specific vision. I work in illustration media as well as cover painting, with extensive experience in graphite, watercolor, and ink line art.My education includes a Bachelor of Arts in Painting and Visual Aesthetics from Union University in Jackson, Tennessee (2014), where I am a repeat guest lecturer on the arts for the Honors Community; a summer Residency at the New York Academy of Art in lower Manhattan (2016); and many art and curatorial assistantships for established artists (2011-2014). I have shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions, received awards and scholarships for my work, and been a performer and guest speaker in academic and artistic events and performances. I run my studio creating portraits, figure painting, illustrations, and other artwork for both private and corporate clients.Although I can create a full cover design, as I did for ROSETTE, ideally I would create a cover painting for your book which captures your story’s aesthetic, often by depicting your main character or setting. You can see this in EVERYDAY EMERSON, an adapted and modernized paraphrasing of Emerson’s essays, for which I created a cover painting combining traditional portraiture with a contemporary aesthetic and organic leaf patterns reflecting Emerson’s emphasis on nature.As shown in my gallery below I also work in a variety of illustration styles, including the traditional charcoal illustrations for ROSETTE which are perfectly suited to historical fiction; more modern black-and-white ink drawings which can depict a wonderful depth of narrative and symbolic content for short stories, science fiction, and other novels; and watercolor illustrations such as those commissioned by the Eliot Society to accompany their performance of Schubert’s Winterreise song cycle.My goal is to create cover art and illustration which embodies your creative vision even more richly than you imagined it, tailoring my ability in various styles to your genre, characters, personal aesthetic, and budget. I am happy to negotiate price, size, ownership of originals, print rights, and copyrights to suit your budget while maximizing your book’s success.