Greetings Loyal Airmen.  As we promised you last week, this week's entry would be a few days early as by the time most of you read this, the Air Chief and his partner, Rob Davis will be in Columbus, Ohio attending this year's Pulp Fest…and having a blast.  But before we head out, we managed to produced and release our 18th title of the year.  It's a weird western written by Fred Adams Jr. with cover and interior illustrations by Zachary Brunner, two of the most creative people we've ever had the pleasure of working with. To that end we'd like to show you just how the cover for this book came about, step by step.

Whereas the story combines elements of horror with the western genre, we certainly wanted both aspects to be visible on our cover.  There is a scene in the book where we learn the main villain has been possessed by a demonic entity that hides in his body and in one particularly gruesome scene, appears as tentacles coming out of his stomach.  Okay, so we had the idea of showing this with our bad guy standing in the middle of a typical, classic, dusty western town.   The Air Chief then scoured the internet for the appropriate elements that would make up this composition.  Needing a tough looking cowboy with his gun drawn, we found just the right image on an old paperback cover.  See above.

Next we had to find just the right background scene and began looking at western towns until we found one that was right for our idea.  We liked the brown and yellow hues and imagined what it would be like with our evil gunfighter standing dead center in front of this setting.

Then it was time to find just the right, oozing, twisting, awful looking tentacles and our search turned up the above image.  Of course we knew it would eventually be colored…but we liked how each strand twisted around like the living thing it is suppose to represent.  So we then send all these three pictures to our super talented Art Director, Rob Davis and gave him the task of combining them to create our desired cover image.

Of course we knew Rob would come through for us like he always does.  When seeing the above photo-shop picture, we thrilled as we now knew we were on the right track.  The only thing that would need to be adjusted in this composite would be to shrink the tentacles….these here were too large and covered too much of the cowboy.  So it was time to send this off to cover painter Zachary Brunner…and explain what we required.  Please keep in mind, we were not asking Zach to “copy” this, but rather do a painting inspired by it.

A few days later Zach sent in the above sketch to see if he was on the right track.  Both Rob and the Air Chief were thrilled.  We discussed the color palette we wanted Zach to use, to be sure we got those yellows and browns for the down and the sky needed to be a very bright, clear blue.  We also suggested giving the tentacles a sickly green hue and adding red to the cowboy's eyes…to make him truly horrific. Then we sat back and waited for Zach to do his magic.

And here is Zachary Brunner's amazing rendition ….completed.  Honestly, he surpassed all our expectations with this piece.  It is totally what we had envisioned…and more.  Zach is one of the most talented and generous artist we have ever had the pleasure of working with and we hope to continue doing so for a long, long time.

Then Rob did his design magic, adding the title, whose colors work to balance the entire piece, the font is also perfect …along with the author's name and our Airship 27 logo…and voila, we have the 18th Airship 27 Productions title of the year.  Having posted the cover all over the internet this morning to announce its release, we've already started getting many wonderful comments of praise for the cover.  And so decided to give all you Loyal Airmen a behind-the-scene look at how these amazing covers come together.
SIX-GUN TERRORS by Fred Adams, Jr is now on sale at Amazon in hard copy and within a few days will be available on Kindle.  We hope you'll check it out.

And there you go, Loyal Airmen.  We're off to PULP FEST.  See you next week.
Ron – Over & Out!