Virgil Finlay is one of my favorite illustrators of all time. The following pictures were reblogged from here. Enjoy and feast your eyes on the wondrous art of one of the best illustrators of the macabre and fantastic.
"Virgil Finlay is widely regarded as one of the world’s greatest
illustrators of science fiction and fantasy. Born on July 23, 1914 in
Rochester, New York, Finlay took to art early in life, selling his first
illustration at the age of 21 to Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright
for the magazine’s December 1935 issue. Over the next 35 years he
completed more than 2,500 drawings and paintings, an achievement made
even more impressive by the time required to execute his painstaking and
labor-intensive pieces. To give his black and white drawings a
photorealistic look, Finlay developed a unique style that combined
stippling with scratchboard techniques (scratch-board being a type of art
board manufactured with a white clay coating that accepts ink and can
be cut away, allowing artists to “scratch” white lines into black
areas). The result was an image so detailed that pulp editors were
initially hesitant to accept his work, fearing that the tiny dots would
not reproduce on their coarse paper stock. Fortunately they did, and the
mesmerizing visions that Finlay brought to the page proved to be
tremendously popular with readers across the decades, from the heyday of
the pulps in the late 1930s to the opening of the Space Age. Working to
the end, Finlay died of cancer in January of 1971, just before Donald
M. Grant published Virgil Finlay, the first of many books celebrating
his unique talent." - quote source
An excellent six page article on Virgil Finlay from a June 1978 issue of Starlog magazine can be found here.
Some of the above Finlay artworks were found at Golden Age Comic Book Stories.
Virgil Finlay was originally posted on Monster Brains in 2006.
An excellent six page article on Virgil Finlay from a June 1978 issue of Starlog magazine can be found here.
Some of the above Finlay artworks were found at Golden Age Comic Book Stories.
Virgil Finlay was originally posted on Monster Brains in 2006.
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