Pencils to Paint: How a Peril Cover Was Physically Made

The order in which a cover gets designed is a separate subject, laid out in thumbnail to finished cover. This page is about the physical object: what it was made of, how big it was, how fast it had to be finished, and what happened to it once the camera had been.

Almost everything here is a constraint rather than a preference. Illustrators in this trade painted the way they did because of what the job paid and what the press could reproduce.

The rough came first, and it was a contract

Nobody started a cover on a blank canvas.

The sequence was a small pencil or ink rough, sometimes a colour sketch, taken to the editor or art director for approval. That approval was the commission. It fixed the arrangement, the number of figures, roughly what everyone was wearing and what the threat was, and it was the point at which the publisher could still change its mind for free.

This is also where the cover’s relationship to the contents was settled, and the trade practice ran in the direction people find surprising: the scene got approved first, and a writer was frequently asked afterwards to arrive at it somewhere in the middle of a story. The cover was the product. The fiction was the filler.

Once the rough was approved the artist transferred it up to full size, usually by squaring off or by tracing an enlargement, and the drawing underneath the paint was rarely reinvented. There was no time to reinvent it and no commercial reason to.

Working large, judging small

The printed magazine was about seven by ten inches. The painting was much bigger.

Two surviving examples with recorded dimensions give the scale of it: a 1937 pulp cover painting by Cardwell Higgins catalogued at 33 by 26.5 inches, and a 1942 cover for Ten Story Detective by John Hilkert at 29.25 by 25.25 inches. Two to three times the printed size was the ordinary range.

There are three reasons for that and only one of them is about detail.

Reduction hides sins. Brushwork that looks loose at arm’s length tightens up when it is shrunk to a third of its size, so an artist could work at a speed that would look crude at final size and get a clean result off the camera.

A big surface is faster for a big shape. Blocking a background across thirty inches with a wide brush takes less time than fiddling the same shape at ten, and the whole economy of this work was about time.

And an original that has been photographed does not need to survive as an object. Nobody was painting for a wall.

The discipline that goes with working large is that you cannot judge large. The habit was to step back constantly, or to look at the painting in a reducing glass or a mirror, because the only opinion that mattered was the one you would form at newsstand distance. Anyone who has enlarged a thumbnail and then admired the enlargement has made this error in the other direction.

Oil, and the exceptions

Oil on canvas or on canvas board was the standard. It stayed workable long enough to be corrected, it photographed cleanly, and it gave the deep saturated darks that a cover needs to carry a figure at a distance.

Gouache and casein on illustration board turn up as well, particularly for artists who worked fast and did not want to wait for drying. They are opaque, they are flat, and they suit a design that is going to be reproduced in flat colour anyway.

The interesting exception is pastel on illustration board, which is what Margaret Brundage used across her Weird Tales run. Pastel is chalky, high key and soft edged, with very little true black available and no way to build a dark the way oil builds one. It produced covers that were instantly identifiable and completely unlike everything else on the same rack, and the identifiability was worth more to that magazine than depth would have been. Her full record, including what the work paid, is in Margaret Brundage and the Weird Tales record.

What gets painted fast and what does not

An experienced cover painter allocates time very unevenly, and the allocation is visible in surviving originals if you know to look for it.

Backgrounds are fast. Large, low contrast, few edges, often a single tone dragged across with a wide brush and then knocked back. The environment on a peril cover is usually less resolved than a first glance suggests.

Costume is fast. Cloth is forgiving because a fold can be almost anywhere and still read.

Hands and faces are slow, and they are where the money went. They carry the entire emotional content, they are the smallest things on the cover, and they are the first place a reader looks after the overall shape resolves. A cover with a competent face and a rough everything else works. The reverse does not.

The contact points are slow too, or should be. Where a rope meets a wrist, where a shoe meets a floorboard, where a shoulder loads against iron. Those are the places a picture proves that the figure has weight, and they are the first thing a rushed painter skips.

Painting for a press you cannot control

The finished painting was photographed, separated and printed by a process with narrow tolerances, on paper that absorbed ink. Everything that implies about colour choice is set out in colour and the eye path, and it is not repeated here.

What matters at the easel is simpler. Assume you will lose the top and bottom of your value range. Assume fine gradations will disappear. Assume a colour will arrive duller and darker than you mixed it. So push the contrast further than looks right, keep the number of distinct values low, and put the accent where you actually want the eye, because the press will not do you any favours and it may quietly remove any subtlety you were relying on.

Anything painted near the edge is also at risk, because the trim wandered on cheap stock and the pulps came out with ragged edges. Keep the important shapes inside a comfortable margin.

And then it was thrown away

Once the plates were shot the painting had done its job.

Publishers including Popular Publications, Street and Smith, Condé Nast and the Frank A. Munsey Company disposed of cover art. Some was given away, some was destroyed outright, a good deal was simply not kept when a warehouse needed clearing. The pictures were not thought to be art and there was no market that said otherwise. Tens of thousands of pulp paintings were made and only a small fraction of them exist now.

That fact belongs in a page about technique, not just in a page about history, because it explains a mystery anyone who studies this work runs into. You will find a thousand printed covers for every original you can look at, which means most of what is known about how these pictures were made has been reconstructed from reproductions of them. The reproduction is the surviving artefact. The painting was a means of getting one.