Using Costumes

Over the years I have made extensive use of costumes in my illustration work.  The better the costume, the more help it is in creating a good illustration.  Sometimes I have raided the thrift stores and resorted to re cutting and resewing my own creations.  But while I lived near Hollywood and did work for film advertising, I was able to make use of a great resource: Western Costume.  That warehouse contained many thousands of beautiful costumes created for and rented to motion picture production companies.

In a single large room dedicated solely to medieval male tunics I would paw through hundreds on triple story racks to find just the one I wanted for a book cover. Not cheap to rent, but worth it.

Below is a picture of one I chose which is being worn by "Rocketeer" artist and pal Dave Stevens for a book cover illustration.

The same tunic in the 1980's and 40 years earlier.

Some years later while watching Errol Flynn's "The Adventures of Robin Hood" I realized that from the myriad of tunics I had picked one from that film.  They kept them in good repair through the decades.

What I'm up to

For my first post I thought I would tell you about my current project.

I am working with George R R Martin and Subterranean Press on the massively illustrated, limited edition of “A Clash of Kings” book two of George’s “A Song of Ice and Fire” series. This will contain (when I finish!!) around 70 black and white illustrations of various sizes and formats and 6 full color images including two wrap around covers.

Here is a shot of the first cover painting in progress.

And the second cover painting.

Working with George (when I can tear time away from his hectic schedule) is stimulating and challenging. Like any proud father he is very protective of his creations and especially their appearance. Some of my sketches have hit the mark right away while others have needed numerous sketches to work out.

A drawing of Catelyn that George liked right off.

George is quite forthcoming with information from his fertile brain about what things should look like, and this sometimes includes details that he has thought of, but never actually written down in his books. (More on that in a future post). That is what makes the work so fascinating. I get the chance to learn things that others don’t know yet, until I illustrate them or George writes them down.

As the project develops check in here for more comments and images of the work in progress.