The House of the Wolf
- THE HOUSE OF THE WOLF - An acrylic painting on a 16 x 20 size canvas board. It is the dust jacket
painting for, "THE HOUSE OF THE WOLF," by Basil Copper, published by Arkham House in 1983. It has recently been reprinted on the DJ of Copper's new book, "DARKNESS, MIST & SHADOW, Volume One, published by PS publications in 2010.
Before I received the contract for this Arkham House book I had discussed the assignment briefly on the phone with editor, Jim Turner, he agreed to give me a free hand with the interior art, I could do whatever I wanted. So, when I got the contract to do the book, obviously it was not specific as to how many drawings I was to do, or what sizes they had to be. But, the total payment for interior art was equivalent to the cost of two full page drawings. Typically, I would have done a frontispiece drawing to face the title page, and a full page drawing to fit somewhere inside the book.
But it didn't turn out that way. Instead, I ended up doing a half-page drawing for each chapter, and the book had 42 chapters! And, I also added a spot drawing! Why did I do so many drawings when I only had to do two? Well, the fact is, every job provides me with 2 income payments; the first of course comes from the publisher who sends me the job. The second comes from someone who buys the original art after it has been published. So, any time I can add some extra artwork to an assignment, even though the publisher isn't paying for it, my income goes up from the sale of the original art. In this case I had 43 drawings to sell instead of just two. This works with book publishers when they are able to add some pages to the book to accommodate my extra artwork. However, this "extra" stuff does not work for magazines because the editor works with a limited number of pages and once his layout is done there is no room for extra material.
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