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Post by Deleted on Nov 10, 2016 12:53:10 GMT -5
Portrait of Ursula Andress as H. Rider Haggard's 'She'  |
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Post by deuce on Dec 1, 2016 9:58:50 GMT -5
A rare rendition of Salome from A Witch Shall Be Born:  |
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Post by deuce on Dec 22, 2016 17:53:08 GMT -5
From Eye of the Overworld:  |
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Post by deuce on Dec 26, 2016 23:43:38 GMT -5
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Post by deuce on Dec 27, 2016 18:54:53 GMT -5
Fabian did some great work for Weird Tales...  |
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Post by Deleted on Dec 28, 2016 13:59:19 GMT -5
Thanks for the link Deuce.  Below is Fabian's account concerning the cover art to Sword Woman for Zebra, in 1977 - this is from the above link. This really demonstrates Fabian's attention to detail in REH's Yarns, and how faithfully he wanted to portray Worlds of Robert E. Howard. When I received the manuscript for this job I was asked by the editor to do some preliminary sketches and bring them to their New York office. A few days later, when I got there, the editor introduced me to her very young assistant who led me to a small room and directed me to a table. On the table were paperback covers that had been removed from their books and laid out neatly in rows; there must have been about 30 or more of them, from various publishers other than Zebra. He pointed to them and said, “I don’t want anything that looks like this junk, I want you to do me artwork that will make a browser’s eyes in a bookstore pop out when he sees your cover and reach out and grab it!” I leaned over to get a closer look at the artwork on some of the covers and I recognized a couple of Jeff Jones covers, another by Frazetta, one by Kelly Freas, and it occurred to me that this table was filled with paperback covers painted by the best artists in the field! Before I responded, I reminded myself that I was in the Land of Oz now, I was not back in Vermont at my old job in the Research and Development department at Simmonds Precision Products trying to convince my boss that resistors R25 and R28 in the Torque Indicator square-wave circuit need to be .5% wire-wound precision resistors in order to make the indicator meet specs. Like many of the characters I read about in science fiction stories over the years, I had taken a step…into another world.
When I returned and showed my preliminary sketches to the assistant editor, he was shocked to see the “sword woman” wearing a wide-brimmed feathered hat, dressed in pantaloons and swinging an épée. “No, No, No” he uttered, “We want her in a steel helmet, wearing armor, and swinging a broadsword, like Conan the Conqueror! This is Robert E. Howard here, not the Three Musketeers!” “But,” I answered, “This is Howard’s version of the Musketeers, all the characters in the story use fencing swords and wear clothes like them. It is the time and place of the Musketeers.” He ran out of the room and came back a few minutes later. “We don’t care,” he said, “we want all the characters looking like barbarians; we want the book to attract the Conan readers.” So that’s what I did, and there you are, anyone who reads this book no doubt thinks that I did not, since my drawings are all wrong in the details! In a way though, I did try to put a hint of the Musketeer look into the pictures.
Also, the editor was not concerned with the cover artwork being faithful to the story, she wanted the book to attract “Conan readers,” and insisted I make my artwork reflect Howard’s barbarian age stories, and suggested the scene that appears on the cover. When I brought the finished painting to the office, the editor thought the sword woman’s breasts were a bit too small so I took it home and made them larger. This time they were a bit too large. I got them “perfect” the third time around. As I rode back home on the bus watching the city streets go by, my thoughts turned to Vermont, my old job, and how much I missed all those “problems” I had to deal with in the lab, the drafting department, the assembly department, the machine shop. Geez, I was thinking of them as “the good old days!”
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Post by deuce on Jan 24, 2017 23:05:10 GMT -5
A rare one from Fabian:  |
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Post by deuce on Feb 26, 2017 17:11:56 GMT -5
The Jules de Grandin character was created especially for Weird Tales by Seabury Quinn. Over time and because of the popularity of the character, there were 93 de Grandin stories and one novel published. De Grandin was usually accompanied on his adventures by his medical friend, Dr. Trowbridge. Sixteen of the WT stories featured interior illustrations by Finlay, among them the portraits of de Grandin and Trowbridge. However, when Popular Library wanted to publish a number of de Grandin paperbacks in 1975 the original Finlay illustrations could not be found. Stephen Fabian was then asked to recreate original portraits based on the original published versions by Finlay. The Finlay depiction of the fictional de Grandin saw print in the October 1937 issue of WT. Hats off to a pair of SF and Fantasy's greatest artists.  Finlay  Fabian |
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Post by deuce on May 6, 2017 13:19:11 GMT -5
The awesome "sleeve" for Fabian's The Tower of the Elephant portfolio...  |
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Post by Von K on May 6, 2017 20:00:58 GMT -5
Totally stunned not only by SF's imagery but also by how prolific he is.
Thanks for the Sword Woman cover anecdote.
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Post by robp on May 7, 2017 5:27:35 GMT -5
The awesome "sleeve" for Fabian's The Tower of the Elephant portfolio... Fantastic pic, not seen that before, thanks for posting! |
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Post by deuce on Sept 29, 2017 21:29:17 GMT -5
Fabian's illo depicting gladiators of Thyatis for TSR:  |
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Post by deuce on Oct 24, 2017 11:06:35 GMT -5
'Tis the season...  |
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Post by thedarkman on Oct 24, 2017 16:16:39 GMT -5
'Tis the season... Brilliant! I love these traditional horror/Halloween works in black and white. Color often dilutes the creepy effect a little, in my opinion. |
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Post by deuce on Oct 26, 2017 12:48:27 GMT -5
'Tis the season... Brilliant! I love these traditional horror/Halloween works in black and white. Color often dilutes the creepy effect a little, in my opinion. Totally agree! Fabian is a master at depicting Gothic Horror. Here's another in a similar spirit...  |
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