This project came to me compeletely out of the blue. I was approached by a production company called Workaholic Productions, who were creating a pilot documentary series for Discovery called “Sci Fi Science”. They had seen my retro designs, like the BSG propaganda posters and the Blue Sun travel posters, and wanted me to create a series of 1950s-era sci-fi magazine covers.
They needed them for their on-screen transitions from segment to segment, but licensing original art from actual magazines was prohibtively expensive. I was given free reign to create the concepts for the covers, as long as they looked authentic (and passed their review, of course).
For one of the covers, however, they had a very specific design in mind. The opening credit sequence had a woman running in terror from alien invaders in flying saucers who were devestating the city. At some point, the action would freeze, and the camera would pull out from the freeze frame to reveal it was part a magazine cover. This was the most challenging cover to design, since the aspect ratio of a television image is very different from that of a magazine cover. To fill the extra space, I used using stock photography to add rubble and a burned-out car to the foreground, and extended the sky. The other challenge was that the woman was cut off in frame just below the waist, but for the magazine cover, because of the layout. we would need to be able to see her legs. While I was able to find a pair of stock-art legs that matched her position, her skirt was tougher to match precisely, so I wound up painting that in digitally.
To create the art, I used a combination of 3D models — rendered in Poser and painted over in Photoshop — and backgrounds which I painted digitally from scratch in Photoshop. Most of the fonts are from the HPLHS Prop Fonts collection.
I spent a lot of time looking at old pulp covers for this project. I wanted to add little touches — like the little bug at the top telling the reader the book cost a whopping 10 cents — to give the art a sense of realism. I drew a lot of inspiration from a book I picked up at a used book seller at a convention a few years ago, called Belarski: Pulp Art Masters, which features the art of Rudolph Belarski, who was one of the most prolific pulp artists of the 40s and 50s. It looks like it may be out of print now, but I’m sure a search of eBay or your local used book store would turn one of these gems eventually.
