I’ve seen a few posts around that suggest I might be upsetting some people by making my image tubes free for non-profit use, especially those people who purchased my tubes from CILM and later from MistakenArt.
Well in defense of my decision to make my tubes available for free I will first state that I have not been under contract to any of the image license sites for over six months now. I am not obliged to any terms or conditions regarding my tubes with these sites anymore. Secondly, since ultimately these tubes belong to me I am free to do with them exactly as I wish. I would hope that for most people its a good thing to have something for free you might normally pay for.
I have recently come to the opinion that since these tubes are legitimately used 99.9% of the time and people like them so much It would be better to make them freely available rather than receive the very few dollars I used to get for selling them through a image license company.
If just one in every three downloaders purchased one of my prints I would easily exceed what I made from image licensing!
I leave that choice to the users of my tubes, however, to see more of my fantasy and science fiction artworks in tube form will ulitmately require more print purchases to be made.
Speaking of those of you who use my tubes, I’d really like to see what you do with them! So don’t be shy about sending them too me or sending me a url.
I was very Sad to read about the death of Frank Frazetta a few months ago. Frazetta’s fantasy and sci-fi work were always a major influences to me. However I was pleased to read that Frazetta’s cover for Conan the Conqueror sold for a reported one million dollars in November last year. It was one of those paintings where I actually bought the book because the artwork enticed me to do so!. I did originally see Frazetta’s artwork for A Princess of Mars in an auction catalog when I was working at Christies (mid nineties). So its probably not that surprising one of his Conan painting went for so much. All in all a sad day, and a great day for artists in the same genre .
Frank Frazetta
On another note I bought a copy of Icon a couple of years ago and it’s a great addition for any Frazetta fan.
Talking of Frazetta I’m surprised how little a lot of people know about his artistic influences especially J Allen St John and Frank E Schoonover. J Allen St John in particular really grabbed my interest when I was looking at Frazetta due to the dynamic compositions of his pulp covers. It’s not hard to see where Frazetta drew a lot of his artistic style from when you have the chance to admire the art of J Allen St John. I’d certainly recommend this book from Amazon The Paintings of J Allen St John: Grand Master of Fantasy for anyone who has more than a passing interest in fantasy and sci-fi art.
I’ve done quite a few of the “Artist Q&A” for ImagineFX magazine, but it’s always good to answer a question with artwork that you really enjoy doing. My contribution to issue 56 was exactly that! It was a lot of fun to do and great to see it in print too. I tend to do more fantasy related work for a lot of my clients so this was a nice change of pace with some Science Fiction (something I don’t do enough of). I couldn’t help but think of Kelly Freas when I painted my ‘Golden age Sci-Fi’ alien with all the tentacles and stuff; I guess he was my inspiration for this project.
I’ve always been a sucker for nostalgia and pulp fiction, or pulp science fiction if you prefer. When it comes to the golden age of sci-fi it’s the period from the 1940′s to the 1980′s that interests me the most , especially the great artists that illustrated during that wonderful era.
