And the Winner Is...
We all have our own ways of coping with stress. For me, it’s doing art for pure enjoyment. But art can serve multiple purposes and this is true of the pulp copies that I make periodically. As I’ve mentioned before, the main purpose in creating these pieces is to better understand the painterly approaches used on those fabulous, garish magazine and book covers that we all still love. But there’s more to it. Styles and techniques have moved on. Without getting too in-depth, art started down the road of photo-realism some time ago. It also took a parallel track into cartoony styles in growing waves. More than that, we have seen a trend for several decades towards book covers showing little interaction between the characters, each other, and their environments. I learned my trade as an illustrator a long time ago and I’ve seen these changes happen in real time. Gone are the days of truly inspired illustrations such as we last saw during the 1970’s but which peaked during the 1940’s and 1950’s.
So how does an artist relearn things that have been lost? You study what was done before and venture onto an older path. I’m an excellent photo-realistic artist and the use of tight details was the first thing I had to get rid of. I also had to learn to paint in broad strokes, which was another thing that photo-realism shoved by the wayside. I’ve studied color palettes and learned, for example, that a blue we commonly use today—Ultramarine—was not in heavy use during the pulp era (1920’s—early 1950’s). Instead, artists relied on Phthalo Blue, almost exclusively. Details like that matter. Many of those original pulp paintings were created in oils but as I don’t work in oils currently, I have experimented with a variety of other techniques (except for digital) to reproduce the art. These techniques range from acrylics to colored pencils, even Crayola crayons!
I thought it might be fun to show you what I consider my top pulp cover copies created over the last few years. (I will cover the black and white copies in a future post.)
Best Copy Overall
Fan Favorite
Best Copy Using The Original Technique
Best Crayon copy
Best Shadow magazine cover
Best Pretty Girl
Best Sexy Girl
Best Complex Machine
And now back to the drawing board. This is the Rocketeer signing off for today.
Great stuff.
Stay away from the oils, they make you 😵 unless you're outside.
One of my early loves in that genre, although not as OLD is John Bolton. I used to be a completist of a few creators of comic books and such, but have since dumped most of that load.
He embraces that style well in much of his earlier paintings. Used to wear a war era gas mask to deal with it, but his models didn't get that luxury.
I also dig Matt Wagner and Grendel. He's a fan of the early 1900s and art deco, but doesn't have the realistic depth.
Multi media!
😉😉
How cool! :-)