I have been in love with black and white interior illustrations for a long time. In the late 1980’s when publishers started pushing for color wherever they could, I refuted the claim that black and white illustrations were uninteresting and uninspiring. At that point it was rare to see interior book art in anything but children’s books and graphic novels anyway. But I never gave up on interior illustrations for all types of stories. Now that they’ve begun to come back around it’s nice to see stories illustrated again. But current styles don’t do it for me artistically. Instead, I remain focused on pulp era interior artwork. There are quite a few different types of pen & ink styles to be found during that period. And the quality of art varies from awful to extraordinary. I’m not sure where my skills rank in that continuum, somewhere in the upper middle, I’d guess.
Edd Cartier is one of the pulp illustrators I find fruitful to study. Seeing his work often reminds me how far I have to go in my own use of brush and ink. But there is an innate similarity between his style and mine and I enjoy exploring this connection through time.
In this week’s ROCKETEER I deconstruct one of Edd Cartier’s wonderful illustrations from the late 1940’s. I also created a new piece using brush and ink artwork to experiment with those same design techniques. You can read it here—https://lucinarocketeer.substack.com/p/pulp-art-technique
