Jeffrey Catherine Jones was born in Atlanta, Georgia where they attended Georgia State College in pursuit of a degree in geology. In the mid-1960s, Jones began submitting art to magazines such as ERB-dom, Styx, Heritage. After graduating college, Jones and their small family moved to New York City to pursue an art career. They quickly found work drawing comics pages for King Comics, Gold Key, Creepy, Eerie, and Vampirella, as well as Wally Wood’s Witzend, and contributing cover art and interior illustrations to science-fiction pulps like Amazing and Fantastic. Jones’ science-fiction, horror, and fantasy illustrations first appeared on magazine and paperback covers for books including Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser series, Andre Norton’s Postmarked the Stars, The Zero Stone, and Uncharted Stars, among others.

With the mid-to-late 1960s being a golden era for paperback illustration, Jones was commissioned for a various projects such as painting the cover art for the Edgar Rice Burroughs novel, I Am a Barbarian, and cover and interior illustrations for Red Shadows, a collection of Robert E. Howard’s Solomon Kane stories. During this time, Frank Frazetta’s work was also high in demand and directors sought Frazetta-esque style artwork. Jones was highly influenced by Frazetta and with the overlapping themes and characters of science fiction and fantasy paintings, Jones and Frazetta’s work took on a similar style.