All
prints come
"ready to hang"
in handmade
hand-embellished
"Artist's Frame"
"ready to hang"
in handmade
hand-embellished
"Artist's Frame"
Print £33_4 x 8.5 inches (10 x 20 cm) framed
Print £66_6 x 12 inches (15 x 30 cm) framed
Print £99_9 x 19 inches (23 x 48 cm) framed
Print £15013 x 28 inches (33 x 70 cm) framed
About "Artist" Frames
This week's
Legendary Art is "Les Grottes de Kalte" number three of four paintings
created for Editions Gallimard, a French Publisher of young adult
fiction to be precise, and completed on 23rd of January 1985. Gallimard
was based in Paris but had a London office and a meeting there
preceding Christmas proposed the idea of Peter taking on cover design
development of Joe Dever's Lone Wolf roleplay game series for the
French speaking market as Gallimard recognised the key design work he
had used to launch Puffin Books Fighting Fantasy series and the envious
sales numbers it attracted.The challenge was a significant one. The deadline was extremely tight.It
was the only Christmas Peter ever worked for a client (though we did
once receive a faxed commission enquiry from Israel one Christmas Day)
as he normally reserved that period of the year for private,
experimental or personal work, and the deadline was absolutely
murderous, but he wanted to handle the project so he and I agreed to
"do Christmas in January" and to the sound of B.B. King's "Better not
look down, if you want to keep on flying" he stopped only for the basic
necessities of life until the four covers were complete.
These
first four Lone Wolf (Loup Solitaire) covers were to prove to be the
first in a long line of Lone Wolf titles created for Gallimard as
Peter's cover ideas became extremely popular in France to the extent
that French school children were asking Gallimard to get Peter to sign
editions he had illustrated, ultimately the works proved popular right
across Europe. Edizioni E. Elle in Italy (Trieste) were the printers
for the French series and went on to license and distribute Italian
editions with the images as Licensee of The Solar Wind Picture Library.
Ultimately, as was also the case with Peter's Fighting Fantasy
visualisations, the Picture Library, which I ran, ended up with a global
client list of licensees of Peter's roleplay Art, from as far apart as Rio de Janeiro
to Sydney. During the process, Red Fox in London, who had hitherto not 
been involved, also licensed early numbers in the series and then went
on to commission later ones which in turn also got licensed back to
other publishers. "Once I had created a few covers for Berkley Books in
New York a situation then arose where I was, basically, creating a
cover design for a Lone Wolf series book which had every chance of
being "a global book cover". In
these days of instant e-mail it is easy to forget the impact that the
humble fax machine, new to the small office market at the time these
works were created, had in terms of the globalising of a studio's
market. More amazing was the fact that, in an era where the PC was
simply not yet on the market, Peter wrote a database to control our
copyright licensing and we ran it off two ZX Spectrums slaved together.
Unbelievable as it must sound, we ran an entire company off 2 primitive
games machines, a dot matrix printer and a thermal fax machine for
quite some considerable time before we managed to acquire a PC. Even
so, primitive though they were, those simple tools and a 35mm SLR
camera that facilitated our catalogue, were, alongside Peter's Art, the
backbone of how we ran Solar Wind, inarguably a global success story.Red
Fox, England; Editions Gallimard, France; Asterios Delithanasis,
Greece, Edizioni E. Elle, Italy, Amber Publishing, Poland and Federal
Publications, Malaysia, just to mention a few users of this particular
picture.Painted in Peter's specially invented "Acryloil" technique it has withstood the test of time
and is still as fresh as the Christmas it was created (I can vouch for
that)! I love the Dragon pictures and Peter has painted a lot of them
with dedication and skill - and above all - originality - they are not
"genre derivative". They all appear throughout the 3 volumes (books) of
"HEROES & VILLAINS".Looking back, I'm glad we decided to "do Christmas in January".
See it in this
Collector's Edition book
