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Dust Jacket for the personal
copy of the e-book.
ADAPT OR DIE COVER
I used the back cover art from the
original painting for "Images of Tomorrow" cover.
Now, to me this is an alien
world, with the heavily clouded sky. To the lower-middle left, just
under the Orange treetops I see what might be the suggestion of water.
But, of course, this is probably an illusion. But there, lifting
out from behind the trees is the
tip of the star ship which took the characters in the book to their new
world. I literally did some reworking of the colors with Photoshop 5, then
added the tip of the space ship from the front of the cover, making it
wider, thicker, as I did with the image in "screen panel" and colored some
of the details there.
Images of Tomorrow:
The original painting Dad first
cover for a sci-fi magazine:
Science Stories.
SWORDMEN OF VISTAR
The
art of creating art for covers can be quite involved. It isn't enough
to just whip up a cover idea and submit it in totality. That takes
up a lot of time, and if very iffy. Too many changes. With
a manuscript you simply retype a page here and there, or even the whole
manuscript - or have it retyped by your typist. With art it is necessary
to redesign, sometimes not only make changes but actually re-paint it from
top to bottom. So ... You are very careful as to how to go about
submitting art to a pubisher.
Sometimes I would actually come up with ideas for covers - in fact some of his early work was a kind of collaboration. I was the fan, dad an artist with very little interest in sci-fi, nor cover art, for that matter. He was into other areas of commercial art (working for the motion picture industry). But he decided to do covers to please his son - and in the long run managed to make a few bucks here and there over the years, and in his retirement a nice little side income.
In any case, these three paintings were totally his designs - I had little or nothing to do with them. I think they are great, and very illustrative of this original thinking.
The first picture is something which Dad did that was totally original. I have always liked it. I found this, with the following two pictures in a box of photos, taken many years ago. I was sorting, like most of us do, and discovered several of Dad's cover paintings. I believe that this one was published in Europe.
Generally
the publisher would rather give out assignments. But this, of course,
goes to the local known artist - and many times is a result of the "buddy
system" - meaning, the editor picks somebody he favors for some reason
or other (perhaps his wife's brother?). Getting into the market,
alone, can be a problem.
So what you do, generally, is
whip up a sketch. I have the sketch for this one hanging in my office -
this very room. The finished painting is the result, I believe, of
an editor giving the go ahead, then at the last moment finding it didn't
work right for him - too dark. The next painting, which was another totally
original idea of dads, If I rememer right, was basically a "sketch" which
was sold to Fantasy & Science Fiction by in the 1950's. Then,
also, sold to at least one other market, either in Europe or Mexico.
I always liked it.
The
final picture is a rough sketch which was used to sell a cover to Amazing
Stories, during this same period of time.
Dad did a series of covers for Zif Davis Publications - they published Amazing Stories and Fantastic Stories, two very popular digest size magazines.
Forrest J Ackerman, who was serving as dad's agent (after I'd sold his first cover to Ray Palmer's Science Stories), managed to open this market for "us" - cause the first covers I literally designed, which was really a thrill for me.
Well, "we" worked this way: I'd submit stuff to Forry and he'd market it to the publishers. In the case of Amazing & Fantastic, he managed to get them interetested in Dad's work, even though we were on the West Coast and they were located on the East Coast - a dividing line of so many miles that it was impossible to simply walk into their editorial offices, and talk covers with them. So everything had to be done by mail.
But it worked!
They literally offered assignements, some which were shared with the author who was told to write a story around dad's cover. This took place two times with Robert Bloch, who wrote the original story upon which Hitchcock's "Psycho" was based.
The third cover here was sold to Amazing Stories using this very picture/sketch. Once they gave the go-ahead the final art was painted, submitted and accepted for publication.
Generally that was the way business had to be done at that time in the early 1950's.
Much later, when I got into the
business of writing, then actually selling books to local publishers I
was able to introduce dad's work to them and they were more than eager
to buy up his talents. Worked nicely, because they could not only
get the novel, but the cover art from the same "people"!
