also designed a poster for The Life of Brian inspired by Pieter Brueghel's Tower Of Babel, but it was not used. When the market for film poster illustration dried up in the mid 1980s, Kirby switched his attention to role-playing games. He provided cover art for Duelmasters, Tunnels & Trolls and Wizards & Warriors. However, Kirby's major output between the late 1950s to the 1980s was artwork for book covers for a very wide range of books including westerns, crime novels, science fiction and non-fiction, as well as covers and interior art for science fiction magazines. His first published book cover art was for the 1955 science fiction novel Cee-Tee Man, by Dan Morgan. In 1956, he created a cover for Ian Fleming's book Moonraker. Working for publishers including Panther, Corgi, Four Square and NEL/Mayflower, he illustrated over 400 covers for authors including Brian Aldiss, Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Stephen Briggs, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Craig Shaw Gardner, Ron Goulart, Robert Heinlein, Alfred Hitchcock, Jack Kerouac, Ursula Le Guin, Richard Matheson, Guy de Maupassant, Terry Pratchett, Robert Rankin, Jimmy Sangster, Jules Verne, and H. G. Wells. Kirby's most significant work in the 1980s was the covers for the Discworld series, a commission that Kirby thought would be a "one-off". Starting with The Colour of Magic, he eventually produced the covers for 26 of the series until his death in 2001. Upon his passing, his successor Paul Kidby painted a portrait of Kirby into the cover art of the novel Night Watch, in tribute to the artist. Style Throughout his career, Kirby used oils, acrylics, gouache, or watercolor, often using more than one method on a single piece. Ultimately, he preferred oils as they would not dry too quickly and could be manipulated and applied in layers. This allowed them to be retouched or entirely painted over, whatever it took to achieve the result. When asked about influences, he most often named three past artists. The oldest was Hieronymus Bosch, famous for his fantastic imagery, detailed landscapes and illustrations of religious concepts and narratives; next was Pieter Bruegel, whose religious and mythological depictions expanded the viewer's perspective of reality; and finally muralist Frank Brangwyn, an avant-garde artist-craftsman notable for his boldly-coloured murals. Kirby worked slowly and meticulously. It would take him four to eight weeks to complete a single painting because his process included reading each novel before illustrating it. He would