Pulpfest has asked me to make a few videos highlighting various pulp artists. My first one, “Artists of The Spider” is now up on YouTube. In this case, we’re talking about four pulp artists: John Newton Howitt (1885-1958), Rafael DeSoto (1904-1992), Walter Baumhofer (1904-1987) and John Fleming Gould (1906-1996). You can watch the video here. Here are some of The Spider covers highlighted in the video:
In last week’s ROCKETEER, I premiered a new pulp copy–“The Shadow” magazine cover featuring “Hidden Death” (September, 1932 issue.) I also talk about my journey as a pulp artist and historian, trying to better understand how the original art was created so that I can create new pieces that have the colorful and melodramatic pulp-art feel. In the article I show you some of my original fine art pulp pieces. You can see the new copy and read all about it here.
For this week’s art practice I chose to make a copy of a newspaper illustration by Dan Smith from the early years of the 20th Century. Smith’s pen and ink work is superb and I wanted to test my skills. I chose a cropped image of his “Antony and Cleopatra” illustration as my subject. There’s no question that this was a difficult copy. His marks are so delicate and complex that I had to make the copy section by section in order to not create too much confusion for myself.…
As a pen & ink artist I usually prefer a highly-textured style, using many different ink marks for varied effects. But there is another, simpler, style of inking which was extremely popular during the 1960’s and 1970’s. In this week’s ROCKETEER I take a look at this minimalistic style of inking in a range of artwork from classic children’s book illustrations to the pop art of Peter Max. Read it here: https://lucinarocketeer.substack.com/p/an-extraordinary-line
In this week’s ROCKETEER I’m talking about a character from the “Captain Future” pulp stories, the android—Otho. More people today know him from the Captain Future anime from the 1970’s than the original stories. The anime takes some liberties with the character’s original design. In my post I talk about those changes and how Otho was originally conceptualized. You can read “Reconstructing Otho” on Substack. I’ve been noodling around with some Otho drawings using the original design from the 1940’s. Because he’s supposed to be a master of disguise and…
Today is a big day for me. I have spent the last few months creating a series of new pulp paintings and also rebuilding my studio website—Flying Pony Studios. I’ve added a Woo Commerce shop to that site and this will impact Lucina Press in several ways. The biggest impact is that in the not-too-distant future my eBooks will be for sale over at the Flying Pony Studios shop, along with prints of my book artwork. In other exciting news, my new illustrated novelette—INCORRUPTIBLE—will soon be available in print and…