Category: Illustration Art

Book/Magazine Covers (All) · Illustration Art · Look Here · Peter Lloyd

Look Here: One lovely cover with antiseptic airbrush art by Peter Lloyd

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Last time I scanned and posted two covers with uncredited, unsigned art in a style that precisely matches what we see on the cover of Richard A. Lupoff’s The Crack in the Sky, a reader more knowledgeable than I am kindly delurked to suggest that the artist might be Peter Lloyd, and since I agreed with the attribution then, I’m going to go out on a limb now and claim that the uncredited creator of the unsigned cover art here is also Peter Lloyd:

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But whether by Peter Lloyd or not, it’s lovely work, don’t you think? Slightly menacing, too, like a glittering shard of glass grasped by the hand of a child.

Art Collection · Illustration Art · Look Here

Look Here: A CONGORILLA splash page with art by Neil Vokes and Jay Geldhof

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This morning, I’m going to dip into our collection of original art, and… picking at random… sort of… I’ve got… the opening splash/credit page from Congorilla #3 (January 1993), with pencils by Neil Vokes and inks by Jay Geldhof:

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The way that this page came into our possession is not at all interesting, but I’m going to tell you about it anyway. Back in about 2001, we were looking to buy some original comics art to frame and display in our son’s room, and as I perused the listings on ebay, I noticed that one seller with the screen name “artguy” always seemed to have an interesting selection of all-ages work for sale with very low starting bids. So I found a page I liked, placed several bids, won the auction, and discovered, through experience, that artguy was a very friendly, very reliable seller who didn’t overcharge for shipping! And I guess I got caught up in the process, because I ended up buying quite a few pieces from artguy, including — if memory serves — the Buscema page that I posted earlier.

Anyway, the Congorilla page that you see above was one of FIVE pages that I bought (all for our son’s room, of course!) with pencils or pencils and inks by Neil Vokes. I was not a fan, or even simply a reader, of Congorilla before or after I bought the page, nor was I particularly a fan of Neil Vokes and/or Jay Geldhof. Rather, I bought the page entirely on its own merits, i.e., because I was impressed by the overall design of the image and by the extensive, attractive use of counterchange throughout, because I was amused by contrast between the man’s words — “Death… Death…” — and the deflating exclamation — “HUMBAH!” — from the gorilla (?) in the background, because I thought the boldly lettered headline quotation from the classic children’s bedtime prayer, “Now I lay me down to sleep,” gave the tableau a sort of weird edginess that would irritate my in-laws, because I thought that the drawing and text together made a bold statement that would read even from all the way across the room, and, of course, because the price was right!

Unfortunately, I have yet to frame any of the pages that I bought from artguy. But our son will inherit the lot of them… eventually…

And who knows? Maybe… eventually… there will be a grandkid’s room to decorate, although the picture is probably inappropriate for a nursery.

Probably… inappropriate… HUMBAH!

Book/Magazine Covers (All) · Illustration Art · Look Here · Rachel L. Carson · Robert Jonas

Look Here: One lovely cover with art by Robert Jonas

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Unfortunately, I have only the one paperback with cover art by American illustrator Robert Jonas (1907-1997) in my collection, but the Set of Robert Jonas over at Flickr includes almost two hundred!

Book/Magazine Covers (All) · Illustration Art · Look Here · Milton Glaser

Look Here: Three classics with cover art by Milton Glaser

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More cover scans, from the library of yours truly:

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Keywords: Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes, The Death of Ivan Ilych by Leo Tolstoy, Jonathan Wild by Henry Fielding.

BONUS IMAGE:

Abram Games · Illustration Art · Look Here

Look Here: One powerful paperback cover with art by Abram Games

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As a young man with a budding career as a freelance poster artist, Abram Games (1914-1996) first rose to prominence as Britain’s Official War Artist for posters during World War II, and parlayed his success in that effort into an award-winning post-War freelance career in advertising, corporate branding, book design, and more. His bold, seductive, innovative combinations of image and text attracted clients such Shell, Financial Times, Guinness, British European Airways, the Royal Shakespeare Company, London Transport, El Al, and the United Nations. He designed stamps for Britain, Ireland, Israel, Jersey and Portugal. He designed logos for the 1951 Festival of Britain (winning the 1948 competition), BBC Television (1953), JFS (a Jewish secondary school in Kenton, north London), and the 1965 Queen’s Award to Industry. He produced murals. He invented a vacuum coffee maker — the Cona Coffee Machine — that is still in production today as well as a circular vacuum cleaner and a portable hand-held duplicating machine. And he designed and illustrated book jackets for the legendary British publisher, Penguin Books, among others.

Why am I telling you all this? Because earlier today I happily paid a buck for a beat up copy of the 1958 Penguin paperback edition of Flames in the Sky, a “History of the War in the Air” by a military insider, the French flying ace Pierre Clostermann. Although the cover art is uncredited, it is clearly signed “A. Games.” But that meant nothing to me until after I got home with my purchase and looked up A. Games via Google and found articles about his career on the Wikipedia and Design Museum sites. I just bought the book because I thought the cover was first rate! Here’s a scan of my find:

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Gertrude A. Kay · Howard Pyle · Illustration Art · Look Here

Look Here: Four sumptuous colour illustrations by Gertrude A. Kay

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Seems like I’m constantly flipping through dusty, inexpensive old books searching for hidden gems of illustration, and more often than not, coming up empty. Yesterday, however, I finally, after a bit of a drought, came across a book with pictures that I thought would make a lovely addition to the archive here at RCN.

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The interior images are a little soft, but that’s due more to certain technical shortcomings of the reproduction than to my obdurate incompetence as a scanner.

What I didn’t realize when I purchased The Little Lame Prince and Other Stories (Philadelphia: David McKay Company, 1927) by Dinah Maria Mulock, is that the illustrator, Gertrude A. Kay, was a student of Howard Pyle at the Drexel Institute in Philadelphia! You can read a short profile of Gertrude A. Kay, who was successful both as a illustrator for women’s magazines and as a writer and illustrator of children’s books, over at a site called Illustration Art Solutions.

Art Collection · Illustration Art · John Buscema · Look Here

Look Here: A Conan page with pencils, inks, and tones by John Buscema

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I recently built a plywood cabinet that is two-feet deep by three-feet wide by four-feet high, with five adjustable middle shelves and one non-adjustable bottom shelf, as a central location to store original artwork, limited-edition portfolios, a couple of massive art books, full sheets of watercolour paper, etc., which means I am now able easily to shuffle through our collection for items to scan and display here at RCN.

First up is a page of original art by John Buscema from issue #10 of Conan the Savage, a short-lived, black-and-white Conan spin-off series from the mid-1990s; the story is titled “The Necromancers of Na’at.” I bought the page for three main reasons: 1) I had long coveted a page with BOTH pencils and inks by John Buscema; 2) the pencils, inks, and China Marker tones here are ALL by John Buscema, and 3) the price was right. The fact that the page is signed by Buscema didn’t really enter into the equation, but it’s a nice bonus, I think.

Here, take a look:

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To be perfectly frank, if I had had unlimited funds, this is not the page I would have selected. Instead, I would have snapped up a Conan the Barbarian page or three from one of those issues where Big John inked his own pencils without the additional China Marker shading. Unfortunately, such pages are prohibitively expensive for low-level collectors like me. So long ago I made up my mind to be happy with the best of what I could and can afford!

Book/Magazine Covers (All) · Illustration Art · Kelly Freas · Look Here

Look Here: Four more splendid SF covers with art by Kelly Freas

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As promised almost two weeks ago, here are four more covers with art by Kelly Freas, freshly scanned from the collection of yours truly:

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Older SF fans will no doubt recognize the illustration on the cover of Astounding: John W. Campbell Memorial Anthology as a reprint of the famous cover of the October 1953 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, which, apparently, was Kelly Freas’s debut as an SF illustrator. Campbell commissioned the cover from Freas as an accompaniment to Tom Godwin’s short story “The Gulf Between” — not included in the memorial anthology — and twenty-four years later, the rock band, Queen, commissioned Freas to created a pastiche of the image for their 1977 album, News of the World.

Keywords: Frank Kelly Freas; Astounding, edited by Harry Harrison; Dread Companion by Andre Norton; The Zen Gun by Barrington J. Bayley; The Wizards of Senchuria by Kenneth Bulmer.

Illustration Art · John Schoenherr · Look Here

Look Here: Selections from NOBODY’S CAT, illustrated by John Schoenherr

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John Schoenherr (1935-2010) is perhaps best known for his covers and spot illustrations for Frank Herbert’s Dune series. Herbert himself is purported to have said that Schoenherr is “the only man who has ever visited Dune,” and you’d be hard pressed, I think, to find any hardcore fans of those books who would disagree with the author’s assessment. So when I came across a battered old copy of Nobody’s Cat by Miska Miles, illustrated by John Schoenherr, I was, first, delighted to discover another side to the artist’s career, and second, impressed by the stark, uncompromising ferocity of his vision of a day in the life of a “wild cat” in the inner city. So even though the book was a library discard, the cover was barely attached, and several pages were stained beyond repair, I bought it anyway — it was only a quarter — sliced the pages completely loose with a scalpel and a straight-edge, and scanned the following images for your enjoyment:

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Keywords: Nobody’s Cat (Toronto: Little, Brown, & Co., 1969) by Miska Miles; John Schoenherr.

Book/Magazine Covers (All) · Davis Meltzer · Illustration Art · Kelly Freas · Look Here

Look Here: Five more SF paperbacks with cover art by Davis Melzer

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More cover scans this morning, which I know will come as a big relief to those of you for whom it comes as a big relief:

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The most obvious influence on Melzer’s art in the early 1970s was Kelly Freas. I have more Freas covers to post, so stay tuned for that, if that’s that sort of thing that’s your sort of thing.

Keywords: Margaret St. Clair, The Dancers of Noyo (NY: Ace, 1973), 13600, with cover art by Davis Meltzer; Theodore Sturgeon, The Worlds of Theodore Sturgeon (NY: Ace, 1972), 91060, with cover art by Davis Meltzer; Bruce McAllister, Humanity Prime (NY: Ace, 1971), 34900, with cover art by Davis Meltzer; Clifford D. Simak, Time and Again (NY: Ace, nd), 81001, with cover art by Davis Meltzer; Andre Norton, Web of the Witch World (NY: Ace, nd), 87871, with cover art by Davis Meltzer.