8 - UK Cover Artists - Paperback
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Colin Henderson Andrew was born in Dundee in 1933, and worked as a junior for Mallard Features studio in Glasgow. He drew cartoons for Lilliput, and wrote and drew a strip about anthropomorphised steam trains for a local newspaper. After his national service, he joined the King-Ganteaume studio in London, and drew westerns and historical strips for Miler & son titles like Pancho Villa, Rocky Mountain King and TV Heroes. After the studio broke up, he continued to work for Kenneth King, drawing for Lone Star and Space Ace.
He drew "Captain Morgan" for Zip in the late 1950s and collaborated with Hawke writer Willie Patterson on two newspaper strips, one a history of the World Cup, the other on famous footballers, on "What is Exhibit X", a strip about a scientific investigator in Boys Word, and "The Guinea Pig" for Eagle. During the 1970s and 80s he concentrated on illustration, but he returned to comics in the 1990s, drawing for Doctor Who Magazine.
He died at the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead in late February 2013.
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Roy Frederick Carnon, born in England in 1911, had grown up in Isleworth, West London, attending art school in Chiswick for a short time. He became an illustrator, working mainly for advertising agencies; during the Second World War, Carnon continued to sketch even when he was working as a fireman during the London Blitz; he subsequently joined the RAF ground crew and was dispatched in Africa, India and the Far East. After returning to civilian life, Carnon continued to work in advertising, as well as producing book covers. He was responsible for a number of covers for Edgar Rice Boroughs' science fiction novels published by Four Square Books in 1961-65 and illustrated "Famous Fighting Aircraft" for the Collins Wonder Colour Books series in 1964.
In 1965, Carnon became one of the members of the team responsible for producing concept drawings, sketches and paintings for 2001: A Space Odyssey. His official designation was 'scientific design specialist and visual concept artist'. For this he was responsible for visualising space craft, film sets and the iconic 'wheel' space station, that in his rendering is almost indistinguishable from the final product. http://www.2001italia.it/2013/10/the-art-of-roy-carnon.html
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Chevalier Fortunino Matania (16 April 1881 – 8 February 1963) was an Italian artist noted for his realistic portrayal of World War I trench warfare and of a wide range of historical subjects. He was involved with a British publication, 'The Passing Show' a weekly paper of humour and short fiction which had two distinct incarnations, both published by Odhams Press, London. The first series ran for 918 issues from 20 March 1915 to 19 March 1932. This was a small tabloid-size magazine, initially with wartime paper restrictions, that gradually grew in size to become a standard tabloid from January 1924. In 1932 the paper completely reinvented itself as The New Passing Show (though the title reverted after eight issues) under editor William A Williamson, who guided The Passing Show from 1925 until the end. It became the UK's most regular periodical source of sf in the 1930s, remaining so until Tales of Wonder and Fantasy began. Its strength was in the (often abridged) serial versions of novels and novellas that it ran. The first were the serializations of Pirates of Venus (7 October-25 November 1933) and Lost on Venus (2 December 1933-3 February 1934) – both reprinted from The Argosy – but with newly commissioned artwork by Fortunino Matania.
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Edward Mortelmans (1915–2008) Born in London. Edward Mortelmans studied at Upper Hornsey Road Evening Art Institute and at the Central Institute of Art an Design. Later he attended the Slade School of Fine Art studying under Randolph Schwabe. His work has included murals, book illustrations, especially on historical subjects, book jackets and advertising design. He commonly works in pen and coloured inks. In 1945 he exhibited at the Royal Academy. His primary modes of expression were watercolour and black and white line drawings. He is best known for illustrating some books by Gerald Durrell and covers for books by ERB. He did some magazine work, including cover design for the first American pulp magazine, Argosy. He has also been associated with illustrating several series, like the Twenty Names series, How and Why Wonder Books and the Oxford Graded Readers series of OUP. Edward Mortelmans' illustrations have been critically acclaimed.
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Ronald William "Josh" Kirby (27 November 1928 – 23 October 2001) was a commercial artist born on the outskirts of Liverpool in the town of Waterloo, Lancashire, in the U.K. With a career spanning 60 years, he is known for being the original artist for the covers of the Discworld novels, as well as some of science fiction's most acclaimed book cover illustrations. Throughout his career, Kirby used oils, acrylics or watercolour, often using more than one method on a single piece. Ultimately, he preferred oils as they wouldn’t dry too quickly and could be manipulated and applied in layers. This allowed for them to be retouched or entirely painted over, whatever it took to achieve the result.
Kirby worked slowly and meticulously. It would take him four to eight weeks to complete a single painting because his process included reading each novel before illustrating it. He would then draw a rough sketch in pencil to be approved by the art editor at the publisher.
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Richard Clifton-Dey (29 May 1930 – 5 April 1997) was a British artist. Born in Yorkshire, as in many cases of artwork produced for book covers, most of Clifton-Dey's artwork is not signed. Provenance for all works not signed by the artist is attested by his widow. His most famous work of art may be Behemoth's World.
He started painting in the 1960s and was one of the most highly respected of British illustrators during the 1970s and into the 1980s. Much of his work was for book covers, either for science fiction, fantasy, action-adventure war books, romances, or gothic horror (with some interesting forays into advertising). His cover artwork included the Lord Tyger novel by Philip Jose Farmer in 1974 and reused in 1985. The Hawkmoon series by Moorcock was issued featuring Richard Clifton-Dey cover art in 1977. The French publishing company Fleuve Noir released several paperbacks from 1981 to 1987 with his artwork.
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Chris Achilleos b1947. is a British illustrator, painter and conceptual artist. Over the past 40 years, he has created some of the best loved fantasy and glamour art and is acknowledged as one of the top fantasy artists in the world.
Christos Achilleos grew up in a rural village near the town of Famagusta in Cyprus; a hot place — perfect for a boy fond of the outdoors. After Chris’s father passed away in the late fifties, his mother moved to London with her four children and Chris began drawing shortly after. When he left school in 1966, he knew he wanted to become a professional artist and attended Hornsey College of Art. There he studied technical illustration and learned about various drawing disciplines, airbrushing and perspective. During his last year at college, Chris became proficient with the airbrush — a skill that proved very useful in his later career as a professional illustrator.
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Jim Burns (born 10 April 1948), is a Welsh artist. He has been called one of the Grand Masters of the science fiction art world. In 1966 he signed up at the Newport Art School for a year's foundation course. After that, he went on to complete a 3-year Diploma in Art and Design in London. When he left Saint Martin's in 1972 he had already joined the recently established illustration agency Young Artists. He has been with this agency, later renamed Arena, ever since.
He is today a contemporary British Sci Fi illustrator. His work mostly deals with science fiction with erotic overtones. His paintings are generally intricate photo-realistic works of beautiful women set against advanced machines and spaceships. While his preparatory sketches are more erotically focused, his final works and published book covers have a more academic tone portraying far off and imaginary worlds.
Apart from book and game covers, Burns briefly worked on Blade Runner, he has also had books of his own works published, including Lightship, Planet Story, Transluminal, and Imag
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Dave Pether - Along with many other well-known British artists, such as Jim Burns, Les Edwards, John Harris and Terry Oakes, Pether contributed to "Heroic Dreams," the terrific fantasy compendium of art published by Paper Tiger, 1987) Pether was an early member of that group of rising British artists of the late 1970s who would become associated with the best fantasy art of the 1980's. He was among those featured in "Fantastic Planet" one of the Galactic Encounters series of books based on the Terran Trade Authority Universe. (Crescent, 1980) He became successful as a book cover artist, spanning several genres (romance, westerns, crime) and also created art for the well-known Games Workshop White Dwarf magazine and box cover art for Psygnosis games 1993-1994.: Wiz n Liz and Puggsy.
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Bruce Pennington (born 10 May 1944 in Somerset) is a British painter, perhaps best known for his science fiction and fantasy novel cover art. Pennington's works have largely featured on the covers of novels of the likes of Isaac Asimov, Clark Ashton Smith and Robert A. Heinlein, adopting both science fiction and fantastical themes.
Pennington's works are largely characterised by bold, daring colours; rich pinks and blues sustaining his continuing motifs of speculation as well as precise brush strokes, harmonious pigment blending as well as the acute concentration in the detail of his depicted subjects, usually landscapes of other times or worlds.
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Joe Petagno is an American artist known principally for creating images used on rock album covers for bands such as Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Nazareth, Black Oak Arkansas, Sweet, Hawkwind, Motörhead, Roy Harper, Marduk, Bal-Sagoth, Autopsy, Attick Demons, Illdisposed and Sodom. He is also known for his science fiction book covers, notably for the Corgi SF Collector's Library edition of Ray Bradbury The Silver Locusts a.k.a. The Martian Chronicles.
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Giorgio De Gaspari. Although his merits have been praised on blogs - Bear Alley and Cloud 109, for instance - hard facts about the artist are almost impossible to come by. This has been noted even by Italian bloggers, who described De Gaspari earlier this year as "a figure about whom many anecdotes have been told for decades but who is, incredibly, almost entirely absent from the internet."
De Gaspari was born on 30 January 1927, possibly in Varese - or the province of Varese - north of Milan in north-western Italy, not far from the Swiss border. He began his career under the auspices of comic strip artist and illustrator Walter Molino who, in the 1940s, was a leading contributor to Grand Hotel, to which paper De Gaspari also contributed; another strip ('Uragano, il re della prateria' [Hurricane, the King of the Prairie]) appeared in Success Collection published by CEA in 1946-47. De Gaspari also worked for Il Giornalino di Carroccio and illustrated 'il Giustiziere scarlatto' for Albi Mignon. http://illustrationartgallery.blogspot.com/2011/07/giorgio-de-gaspari.html
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Bob Fowke - born in 1950, Robert Gregory Fowke Starting his career as an illustrator, Bob Fowke created distinctive artworks and illustrations for a number of science fiction and fantasy novels and anthologies throughout the 1970s and early 1980s. His illustrations have appeared on numerous editions of books including the classic dystopian science fiction novel by George R. Stewart, as well as books by other science fiction heavyweights like Robert A. Heinlein, horror master H. P. Lovecraft and of course Burroughs. Despite starting as an illustrator, Bob Fowke eventually went on to become an author in his own right and turned his writing talents away from science fiction in favour of accessible history books.he did lots of fantastic book covers, included two Lovecraft covers for the Panther paperback editions of the The Horror in the Museum and the Horror in the Burying Ground - a list of his art can be found at - http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?26629
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Ray Feibush (1948-1998) UK artist, occasionally working as Raymond Feibush, known for the string of sf covers he produced for New English Library/NEL during the 1970s; he painted using primarily gouache and acrylics, sans airbrush, and often in a quasi-surrealist style – although as capable as any of producing more straightforward sf artwork. He spent his formative years in the US, attending Forest Hills High School, Forest Hills, New York State, whose alumni association remembers him as "the incredible artist who did so much in our yearbooks"; but in his late teens he returned to the UK in hope of studying art. Failing to obtain a grant, he turned to technical illustration. He painted at least some LP covers; it is said his cover for a recording of Milhaud's La Création du Monde received a Music Week design award, and he certainly did the sleeve for the Marsupilami LP Arena (1971). He illustrated "Goodbye" and "Sun King" in Alan Aldridge's book The Beatles Illustrated Lyrics (graph anth 1969). His first sf commission was for the cover of the 1971 Panther Books paperback of Ronald Hall's The Open Cage (1970). For most of the rest of the 1970s he was painting covers for NEL, including a set for that publisher's reissue of Isaac Asimov's Lucky Starr juveniles and an Edgar Rice Burroughs cover, the 1973 NEL edition of Chessmen of Mars.
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Harry Woolley, was born in Hurst, Lancashire, in 1880. He grew up in Ashton Under Lyme where his father, John (also born in Hurst, c.1843), was a waiter in a public house; his mother, Alice (born in Millbrook, Cheshire, c.1842), was a cotton weaver and Harry was their second child, following Eliza Ann, born in 1871. In census records for 1881 and 1891 the family name is given as Wooley (with one 'l'). By 1891, Alice was widowed and taking in lodgers at their Alexander Street home; Eliza was working as a cotton winder and Harry as a weaver, his age erroneously given as 16, although he was only 10. (I will add that it is not unknown for census records to be in error, as any regular reader will know.) I've not found Alice, Eliza or Harry in the 1901 census but there is a Harry Woolley living in Bristol at the time of the 1911 census, which I don't have full access to. However, by searching in different ways I can say that this Harry Woolley was born in Lancashire and gave his age as 29, so it might be "our" Harry. Harry Woolley was married twice. His second marriage was to Sheelah A. McCarthy in 1954, by which time he was living in Sussex. John, related by marriage through this second marriage, tells us that Harry also made miniatures and produced some wonderful water colours of beautiful and elegant women and landscapes, also producing landscapes in oils. One of his oil paintings (The Wave) can be seen above. He died near Salisbury, Wiltshire, in 1959, aged 78. (Panthan Journal 296)
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