Frank E. Schoonover

Yet another link to Golden Age Comics Book Stories. But this one is a good'n. It's a look at the beautiful work of Frank E. Schoonover. Notice how his paintings look so polished and refined from a distance, but when you click on the image and get up close, you see the individual brush strokes and Impressionistic approach. Really nice.

We're in the midst of our big move to New Mexico, so there's been no time to sketch or anything. I want to make sketching Marty a regular feature here -- after we settle in.

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ANOTHER Great Vintage Illustration -- and One of Mine

I know, I know -- another link to Golden Age Comic Book Stories blog. Maybe you should all just subscribe to them instead. (Or better yet, subscribe to us both!) But I can't get enough of these beautiful illustrations. And this first picture -- by Mead Schaeffer for The Black Buccaneer (1920) was just too gorgeous for me not to pass along. And it's by no means the only amazing painting that Door Tree (what can I do -- that's what he calls himself) just posted tonight.

I'm going to have to try and recreate this style digitally. I've done some acrylic painting in this vein, though nothing close to this kind of quality. But I've done some digital work for a real estate developer where I took photographs and altered them in Photoshop to look like paintings around this vintage. (See second picture.) I think I could push that style further and maybe do something in this spirit.

Of course, even if I could recreate the brushwork and the texture of these classic illustrations, that'll still leave the composition, lighting, pace, mood, period detail -- there will be loads of challenges in trying to match the impact and the flavor of these amazing paintings.

Sounds like fun, huh?

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More Gorgeous Old Covers

Golden Age Comic Book Stories is fast becoming my favorite blog. They've got another winner posted on there -- more beautiful pulp magazine and book covers, like this cover for Bulldog Drummond Strikes Back. Not only does it use color beautifully and have a dynamic composition, but I'm a sucker for a good detective story! There's also a great cover for an issue of The Virginian, which not only sports a great Old West image, but has a beautifully slick Art Deco style logotype. Check out these gorgeous covers!

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Old Pulp Covers -- Make Your Own!

If you haven't seen my previous post about the old N.C. Wyeth pulp cover, go take a quick look at it. In this post I'll briefly show how I took an old cover of my own -- the cover to Jazz Age Chronicles #1, which came out back in 1990 -- making it rather vintage in its own right.

What I wanted to do was make the cover look like it's 100 years old. I wanted it to look like a beat-up old book cover, so to do that I found a beat-up old book cover. (Specifically, it's an old book of Jennifer's about the Beatles. She wanted to make sure I included that.) It has a blank cover, which is essential here, so the only features on the cover are the wear and the tear:

Now, ideally an old pulp magazine cover would be best -- the wrinkles and tears in an old magazine cover are different from the ones in this hardback book -- but I couldn't find such an item, and pulp magazines with blank covers are a little hard to scare up. So this cover would have to do. And it did.

I sized the cover to fit the original cover perfectly. Then I started with the Photoshop hokus-pokus! My first step was put white in the foreground color palette and go to Select>Color Range, and make a selection of the white tears and peels in the surface of the cover. I played with the value until I was getting most of the white and none of the blue. Then I made a new layer and using Option-Delete, I filled in the selection with the white, making a nice opaque white layer of the tears and scraps over the cover art.

Then, going back to the layer with the book cover, I went to Image>Adjustments>Hue/Saturation (or Apple-U -- get it? U? Hugh? Oh, that one cracks me up every time!) and played with the hugh, and the saturation, and the lightness, until the blue of the cover became a nice yellow-ochre of old, faded pulp paper:

This example shows the cover before I went into Image>Adjustments>Curves and played with the contrast until the outside edges were dark again. I don't have a picture of that, but you're visual people -- I'm sure you can see it in your mind.

Then I set that layer on Multiply, so the original cover art shows through underneath. I added a new layer over all of these others and filled it with more yellow-ochre color, and set it to multiply also. Then I just played with the opacity of all these layers, until I got the final look I wanted:

Ta-daah! Not bad, huh? Now, there are other effects I could have used on this, and have in previous work, such as adjusting the color saturation of the artwork, adding some noise texture to the top layer, "tearing" one of the corners by using the lasso to select it and turning it slightly, or even pushing one of the color layers -- cyan or magenta works best -- just a tad, to make it look like slightly out-of-register old-style printing. I never do the exact same effects every time, and that's the fun part -- improvising and finding different ways to make different effects. But these are some basic steps, one basic approach, and if nothing else, they should help you find your own way to go about it.

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Old Pulp Covers -- Look At These!

Another blog we recently subscribed to is Golden Age Comic Book Stories, which actually covers a lot more than just Golden Age comic book stories. For example, see this beautiful old N.C. Wyeth pulp cover from a 1912 issue of The Popular Magazine.

I love this old style -- if you haven't already noticed. I always have. It's hard for me, really, not to make my work lean towards an old-school flavor. So I've stopped trying.

In fact, I've been inspired by the tattered old look of this cover to take one of my own covers and give it a worn, distressed look. And I'll show you that in my next post!

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