Astro Adventures No.7
- ASTRO-ADVENTURES 7 - A black ink and black color pencil drawing on an 11 x 14 size coquille board. The lettering is part of the artwork.
So one day I got up in the morning, had my breakfast and climbed the stairs to my "studio," ready to start on a new assignment. The project I had finished the day before had been a long struggle, and as I looked at the next assignments on the bulletin board I was hoping for something less taxing.
I picked this one, a cover drawing for Astro Adventures. It's a funny thing about "cover" art in the SF and fantasy field, both fanzine and professional magazines often feature cover art that has nothing to do with the stories inside the magazine, and that applied to this cover. All I had to do was draw something appropriate to the title of the magazine. I started by making a few individual rough drawings on a sketch pad, a few common subjects related to SF; a spaceman, a space girl, a robot, and a spaceship. When I was satisfied with them I used tracing paper to transfer each figure onto a drawing paper, in the arrangement you see here on the cover. I completed the united drawing and stopped to have lunch. After lunch I applied the "press-on" lettering, and by mid-afternoon I was done with the job.
Back in 1974, when I first started illustrating full time, it took me a lot longer to do this kind of drawing, I would have spent more time thinking of cover scenarios, I would have spent more time drawing more figures, playing longer with the layout and tinkering longer with the details of each of the figures, and wasting time wondering if what I was doing was going to be "good enough". But practice and experience reduces the fumbling around time and brings more confidence when approaching a job. When I drew this cover in the early 1980s, none of those anxieties that I had in 1974 were present any more, it took a lot less time to do a drawing like this.
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