Sword Woman 1
- SWORD WOMAN 1 - A black Ink and black color pencil drawing on an 11 x 14 size coquille board. It appears in the paperback book, "The Sword Woman" by Robert E. Howard, published by Zebra Books in 1977.
When I received the manuscript of this book I was asked by the editor to do some preliminary sketches and bring them to her NY office for approval. A few days later, after I had read the manuscript and rendered the sketches, I took a bus to the Zebra publishing office in NY. When I got there the editor introduced me to her assistant who looked like a teenager. He led me to a small room and directed me to a table. On the table were paperback covers that had been neatly torn from their books and laid out in rows. There must have been about 30 or more of them, from various other publishers. He then pointed to them and said, "I don't want anything that looks like this junk, I want your artwork on the cover of this book make the eyes of a browser in a bookstore pop out when he looks at it, and won't be able to resist buying the book!"
I leaned over for a closer look at the covers on the table and to my surprise I recognized a couple of Jeff Jones covers, another by Frank Frazetta, another by Kelly Freas! It occurred to me that this table was filled with paperback covers that were painted by the best artists in the field! My idols! - Before I responded, I reminded myself that I was now in the Land of Oz, I was not back in Vermont at work on 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 needed to be changed to .5% wire-wound precision resistors in order to make the indicator accurate to customer specs. Like many of the characters I read about in science fiction stories over the years, I found myself in a strange new world, and I had to adjust.
Feel Free to add your Comments about this Artwork
Please do not abuse this feature or it will be removed, Keep it clean, keep it classy, keep it respectful