I was asked to do a cover for an SF zine called File 770, (a terrible title for a great zine). If I had to start from scratch it would have taken forever, so I offered to work-up his choice of a number of pieces. He chose this one. The original pencil drawing was posted some weeks ago.

The work on this version was done in Photoshop in one evening. What I had in mind was an old pulp magazine, and had no trouble deciding on a type font for the title. But I couldn't pick a colour for the background. Originally it was bright green fading into yellow, and it didn't look at all right. As I began airbrushing the illustration though, I realized I needed something muted, and used a PS tool to sweep through hues and saturations until I found this one, that I liked. Although no true pulp magazine would be this tasteful, it fit the illustration better. Usually the cover painting would be pretty garish too, but I didn't want to have to do full colour for this. In the end, the look I went for was film noir rather than pulp. The work went pretty easily except that I found it necessary to rebuild some of the pencil work after. Particularly the shadow lines under the desk edge. So I spent a couple of hours more painting out mushy, faded lines and redrawing them with the brush tool. Still, I think it came out pretty well for one night's work.

The file that follows was also painted the same evening.