Greetings, Loyal Airmen, we trust you all had a terrific Thanksgiving yesterday and are all properly satiated with good loving company and delicious food.  So sit back and enjoy this behind the scenes step by step making of our latest pulp cover for the soon-to-be released SECRET AGENT X – VOL III.

                                 
Of the four new stories we accepted for this new volume, one was called THE MASK OF MEDUSA and was written by Frank Schildiner.   Like all our entries, it's a rip-roaring, action thriller.  The thing with this particular tale is that its plot (& title) offered up an immediate visual image to your old Air Chief.   What if we were to place our hero in front of a giant female head wearing the title head-piece?   As I am always scouring the internet for old pulp covers and when found, keep them in a specific file aptly titled ..PULP ILLOS.   Amongst my collection was the above image with the central figure in exactly the action pose I wanted.  With that found, I had to then find the other two elements we would need.

I needed to find a visually striking mask.  I proceeded to surf the internet again, this time going to Mardi Gras sites as that is where you will find the most beautiful and original such visages.  Happily I found the above image, the center mask being the one that completely won me over.  Now on to step three.

                       
Medusa, as most of you will recall, was the creature from mythology who had living snakes instead of hair and when men looked upon her, they turned to stone.  Finding this classical picture on-line tool me all of five minutes.  So, I had all three parts of my imagine Secret Agent X cover.  Our hero, the woman wearing the mask, and a decent picture of Medusa.   I then digitally sent all three of the above to my partner, and Airship 27 Prod. super duper art director, Rob Davis.  I explained to Rob my idea for the completed composition and left everything in his more than capable hands.  Rob went to work immediately and in two days….

  …sent me this collage he put together using his Photo-Shop PC program.  And here it was, the exact composition I'd envisioned from the start, complete with our familiar X logo.  I let Rob know he'd hit the bullseye and this was exactly the image we needed him to capture in pencil.

When I saw this finished pencil drawing, I nearly cried, it was so damn beautiful.  Rob completely took these various borrowed elements and turned them into a truly powerful, and original pulp cover drawing.  You have to realize at this stage of the development, I was really getting excited.   This was clearly going to evolve into one of our best covers ever.   So now that we had Rob's drawing, it was time to digitally send it off to Shave Evans in New Zealand to work his color magic over it.

Shane is a true craftsman at digital painting, as is quite evident by his embellishment of Rob's pencils.  I'm just sorry tech limitations don't allow me to show this off larger so that you can fully appreciate the nuances of Shane's color work.   It is truly a thing of beauty, and totally captures the essence of Frank's Secret Agent X adventure.   So now all that remained was for Rob to add the final touch, the title logos and writer's names etc.

VOILA!!!  The official cover to SECRET AGENT X – Vol III.   Note how Rob continued to play with the finished art by having several of the snakes slide over the logo bar giving them a 3D feel.  Simply dynamic work on his part from start to finish.   In the end, this cover is ten times what I had dreamed up at the start, thanks to Rob and Shane.  I cannot thank them enough.   And you, my Loyal Airmen, will soon be the beneficiaries of all this hard work, as hopefully we'll be announcing the release of this book in just another few weeks.  Stay tuned.

And there you have it.  I hope you've all enjoyed this little how-to log.  Of course not all our Airship 27 Prod. covers are put together this way, but often this is the route many of them will take to fruition.  As always, I hope you'll stop by our on-line store, if you've not done so before (see dirigible button to upper left of this column) and check out all our titles for sale.  If you've got readers in your family, books make wonderful Christmas gifts.  And on that note, I'll sign off for this week.

Thanks as ever for stopping by. 
Ron – Over & Out