Posts

The Dynamic Pulp Art of Virgil Finlay

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          Hey everybody! I wanted to get back into talking about writing this next week, but for my final art post for now, I’m going to discuss a person who is possibly one of if not the greatest pulp artist ever. Virgil Finlay (1914-1971) was an American illustrator who took up painting in his high school years and during the great depression started working as an interior illustrator for Weird Tales. Throughout his life he worked with titans like HP Lovecraft and Seabury Quinn. One of his two main styles was a scratchboard technique where he carved into a black board, leaving behind exposed white, kind of like a reverse pen and ink. His other style was painting with either gouache or oils, in a relatively clean and realistic manner.           After the death of pulp magazines, Finlay got a various amount of different illustrator jobs, including doing art for astrology magazines, sci fi paperback novels, book illustration, an...
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Christmas Cards and Disney Movies, the Wonderful Art of Eyvind Earle

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          Hey everybody! This week I wanted to talk about a really good illustrator that I like quite a bit, Eyvind Earle (1916-2000). Born in New York Earle had a difficult childhood, as his father kidnapped him and took him to Mexico for artistic training. He made Earle paint a picture every single day for a few years. During his first showing in Paris however, his half brother helped him escape back to the states to live with his mom.            When he was young, him and his mother lived in poverty during the great depression and in order to make money, they sold Christmas cards. Over the course of decades he became prolific at making cards every year. He also had art shows where he caught Walt Disney’s attention.  Disney asked him to be a part of his team as a background designer. He agreed and helped make movies like “Peter Pan”, “Lady and the Tramp”, and eventually becoming the art director for “Sleeping Beaut...
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The Dark and Beautiful Art of Gustave Doré

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          Hi everybody! This week I would love to discuss another one of my favorite artists, the incredible Gustave Dor é ! Dor é  (1832-1883) was born in France and grew up during a time in western history when printing technology was starting to make some real breakthroughs and illustrations became a far more common sight in books. As you could guess, Dor é became an illustrator and made (in my humble opinion) some of the greatest pieces to ever grace the printed page.           Over his life time he made both wood block prints as well as etchings for books such as "the Bible", "Paradise Lost", "the Divine Comedy", "Grimm's Fairy Tales", and "Orlando Furioso". His works have a dark and beautiful atmosphere to them, as well an incredible amount of detail in each line. Modern pen and ink illustrators got their start being inspired by his generation of artists. The method for making etching is to take a copper sheet, cover...
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Painting the Sublime, the Art of Casper David Fredrich

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          Hey everybody! I wanted to pivot a little bit away from my series on pulps to talk a bit about my interest in visual art. I graduated from Montana State University with a degree in fine arts, so suffice to say, I really love painting and drawing. I wanted to talk about one of my favorite artists, the Romantic landscape painter Casper David Fredrich.                                               Casper David Fredrich Portrait by Gerhard Von K ü gelgen 1810-1820          Casper David Fredrich (1774-1840) was a German Romantic landscape painter that focused on nature, religion, and the sublime, which was a philosophical movement that focused on awe inspiring subjects as a way to humble humanity and remind us of our mortality in the presence of an immortal deity. Mountains, oceans, storms, space, an...
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My Love for Pulp Magazines Part 2

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          Hey everyone! Last week I made a post about my love for the big three of the pulp magazine Weird Tales: HP Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and Robert E Howard. This week I wanted to talk about my interests in the book the Encyclopedia of Monsters and how it got me into pulps to begin with.            When I was 11, I moved to Bozeman Montana from Carson City Nevada and one of the places I liked to spend a lot of time was the local library. I used to walk around and peruse the shelves for interesting looking books. One day I found the horror section and discovered the book called the Encyclopedia of Monsters. It was a book published in 1989 by Jeff Rovin and it contains an absolute gold mine for all things monsters. It includes entries of monsters from poetry, mythology, b movies, comics, trading cards, and of course pulps.            Even though I didn’t have access to actually r...
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My Love for Pulp Magazines Part 1

          Hi everyone! For my second post I wanted to dive a bit more into my interests as a writer. I am a HUGE fan of pulp magazines and they have really shaped my taste in storytelling ever since I was in middle school.           Pulp magazines refer to a type of magazine that was printed on very cheap wood pulp paper. The first pulps started in the 1880s and remained popular in the United States until the 1960s, where they had largely been replaced with TV and the few still remaining magazine titles transitioned into paperbacks. While pulp wasn’t specific to any particular genre, many of the most famous (and my favorites) were fantasy, science fiction, and horror. Some of the main pulp magazines were Weird Tales, Amazing Stories, Planet Stories, Astounding Stories, and Argosy. My favorite of these is Weird Tales as it includes three of some of my favorite authors, Clark Ashton Smith, HP Lovecraft, and Robert E Howard. ...
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Welcome to my new blog!

     Hi everyone! Welcome to my weird writing corner! I’m Zach and I made this blog as a way to share my writing and my art with an audience, because I hope to one day make them a full time career instead of just a weekend hobby. I love to write fantasy and weird poetry, inspired greatly by authors such as Clark Ashton Smith, JRR Tolkien, HP Lovecraft, Robert E Howard, John Milton, and many others. I also am a landscape artist who dabbles in digital art as well as pen and ink. I'm very excited to start this new journey, so please join me on this fun experience!
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