Pulp Artist Visual Survey: Dalton Stevens
This week’s Rocketeer is a sort of hybrid podcast. As this week’s newsletter is about art, it will rely heavily on pictures but with an audio accompaniment.
As mentioned in the audio, here are a variety of Ghost Stories magazine covers painted by Edward Dalton Stevens (1878-1939) from the early 1930’s. I’ve chosen some of my favorites with the interestingly-colored ghosts.
My goal is to create new pulp paintings that feel like the old ones. And after a lot of careful study and practice, it is happening.
Below is my composition called, “The Devil’s Pet.” It’s meant to suggest a story, as if illustrative of a ghost story from that period. My painting is in acrylics and with a palette that is reminiscent of the common 1930’s pulp artist’s palette.
As a fun exercise and as a test to see how close I actually got, I made a faux cover for the painting. I adjusted the colors a little digitally and then put it side by side with one of Stevens’ covers and you can see that the feeling is pretty close!
I’ll share some of my other successes with you in future posts.
This is the Rocketeer signing off for today.
Similar style to Earle Bergey, who I'm more familiar with.
Was digging out my piles of mass market paperbacks, and came across the Ace doubles with flipside novellas. And have a handful of illustrated novels as well that are fun.