Pulp Book Covers

[TheEarnestBunbury]

Two more...

These were both efforts to try a different composition with a couple of different cover designs. Anyone who grew up on hold books will recognize the first design as based on that of Pan books from the mid 50s through to the mid/late 60s. The second was partly inspired by one of the designs used on Mike Shayne novels - I deviated quite a bit but drew more on the use of the gothic font - this one is League Gothic, which I found a close enough approximation.

[kenmo]

Stellar creations...love them all...

[TheEarnestBunbury]

One for the close of the weekend.

[TheEarnestBunbury]

Just having a bit of a play around with this one. I picked up the public domain works of Robert E Howard and although the edition I found is nicely edited and free of major errors, the presentation is a bit dull. Just for my own personal use, I decided to re-format them into ebooks more to my own liking and will later treat myself to some printed editions - starting with Conan. I don't like doorstops, so I'm splitting the Conan stories into four volumes.

Although I'm happy with the overall layout and the fonts, I do need to tweak them a bit (the kearning in 'Tales' is bothering me now that I've noticed it). Of course, this version of Conan owes more to the comics than the original character but I'll try to vary him up a bit with each cover - so he'll have some armour next time.

[D Akey]

Looks to me, in this Conan one, like you're taking it past the original illustration technique into your own very elegant, more transparent style -- one of the characteristics of digital compared with the old techniques and media. I quite like this look you're doing. Feels fresh when less opaque. Certainly the layouts are very vintage.

[TheEarnestBunbury]

I still need to adjust the kearning around the letter 'T' but otherwise, I'm OK with this one now. I'm still planning to set up a blog for creating pulp covers and thought that it would be fun if the tutorial title cards were themselves faux covers. Unfortunately, I have slowed my own progress a tad as I've just bought Affinity Photo and am trying to learn the different ways it does things.

This was the usual method, render in Poser, adjustments in PSE8 with a little help form the Cutout filter (sadly missing from Affinity), then into Artrage and back to PSE8. Limited brush work on the muscles though, as it's a tricky balance of visible brush strokes for effect and lost of detail. Plenty of brush work on the lady though.

[Chad Weatherford]

These are awesome! Is the print dot pattern achieved with a layered overlay?

[D Akey]

Mission accomplished it would seem. Enjoying the series.

[TheEarnestBunbury]

A bit of practice working with background images that I turned into a quick pastiche on the Carter Brown books as published by Signet.

[TheEarnestBunbury]

I finally have a working computer again! It's not a heavy weight but is powerful enough to be like a breath of fresh air.

So, while these aren't completed covers, I am experimenting with a view to making more - though I think there is a little more of the modern comic book about them than old paperback but I'll run with it and see where I end up.

As per usual, I'm using Poser and taking the image first to Serif's Affinity Photo and the Topaz Simplify filter, then it goes into Artrage.

The first of these I took out most of the colour and did a fair bit of over-painting before starting with the palette knife. With the second, I removed all the colour, painting some back for the lips, eyes, and cat - there was less over-painting but lots of palette knife to get the painted effect.