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Sword of the Samurai
(From the book "Heroes & Villains
Volume 2")By : Deborah Susan Jones : Editor & Contributing writerCreated in 1985
for the original Fighting Fantasy Puffin paperback Books
series in the UK (ISBN 0-14-032087-3) Sword of the
Samurai is a single-player role-playing game book
written by Mark Smith and Jamie Thomson and was the 20th book in the
series and was first published in 1986.Along with Peter's
other pieces created for the series, the Warlock in Spite of
Himself, Starship Traveler, Talisman of 
Death and The Riddling Reaver, it
forms a key and memorable part of the book series.As is typical of the era in terms of the
artist's working practice at the time (and to this day)
it is painted in Oil and Acrylic on wood panel and it is
the largest of Peter's Fighting Fantasy artworks
that is not a wraparound cover, the Warlock of Firetop
Mountain being the only title from the series that
he created as a wraparound, which launched the book
series.As was typically the
case with the artist's somewhat unusual working
process at that time it is in fact one of several pieces
created to address the storyline of the book and this was the one the artist
presented to the publisher and 
was used on the book's
cover.The Shogun's world is
shattering as bandits cause chaos in his lands and incursions across his
borders threaten, all triggered by the theft
of the Shogun's sword itself, the mighty Dai-Katana. Needless
to say, as with all the books in the series, you are the
hero, and set out to recover the sword, residing in the
Pit of Demons.It was a great working relationship with Mark
and Jamie with whom Peter also created covers
for their Falcon series published by Sphere
Books. The painting uses the classical triangle
compositional structure in the background overlaid with
the artist's signature 
ellipse method and he
says "I was a heavy user of ellipses in a lot of my
book covers in the 1970s & 80s - I used it to put
rhythm and dynamics into scenes".A further note on "styling" of the SAMURAI
painting >"I painted the background the same way I did
many pieces then, initially with lean acrylic to give a
flat base underpainting - but then I deviated from my
typical next phase, of painting in a fatter acrylic, and
instead glazed the area of the rocks with oil washes to
give the impression of a tapestry-like or watercolour
effect. I then "drew" linear outlines to the rocks with
a fine tipped brush in oil paint."The final touch was to then glaze down the
whole area 
with thin oil washes
(as was typical of my way of working then) so that there
was a meeting point between a stylised traditional Japanese
painting and my own style and technique - a meeting
of cultural styles, a stylistic balance between the two,
to inject a different approach to what would
otherwise have been "a basic book cover commission"."I always like to break away from the norm,
if I can . . . "As with so many other covers produced by
Peter over the years it ended up on many overseas
editions of the book outside the UK, a few of which we
display here.Deborah Susan Jones
