I wasn't planning on new posts until after New Year's, but I've come across some Christmas themed cards from my days in comics retail many years ago, and while they're all nice little bits of art you wouldn't ordinarily come across unless you specifically did an image search on the internet, there was one that was extremely unlikely to have been seen outside of a small number of people.
When I managed a comic book store, some of my regular customers were professional artists. That wasn't too surprising, since we were in a suburb (or exurb) west of Boston and south of Cambridge in Massachusetts. Before the physical world abdicated to the internet, book publishers liked being where the colleges were and illustrators liked being where the publishers were. Chatting with your editor about tweaking a recently submitted work to their satisfaction is a lot easier to do over the phone if you're a prose writer, not so much if you're a graphic artist. Also, before the internet that's where all the killer used bookstores were located and there were dozens and dozens of them back then. Cheap reference material!
Anyway, one of my regulars was Doug Smith, an artist who specialized in scratchboard, a technique that could almost be described as two-dimensional sculpture. The lines are scratched into a surface with varying widths and depths to produce a range of textures that would be difficult to produce with a pencil. In the hands of an amateur, the results would look like a child's carved potato stamp. In the hands of a professional-- well, just see for yourself:
Doug printed his own Christmas cards, making a new one each year. If the style looks at all familiar to fantasy fans, it should. Doug did the covers for numerous Gregory Maguire novels. Many of them, such as the original "Wicked", were die-cuts, meaning that he drew the ornate cover with the title and space to accommodate necessary trade elements plus a hole revealing a portion of a full page illustration beneath the cover. He also did spot illustrations. When "Wicked" was adapted into a stage musical, new printings of the book carried a new cover with the far more minimal art from the theatrical posters. Doug's art wasn't forgotten by fans of the books, though. Among other things, his artwork secured him a brief entry in the Oz Wiki.
Below is the interior of the card:
Occasionally Doug brought by original art to the store, either his own going to or from a print shop or pages of comic art he had acquired. I remember him showing me Kirby pages and some of Hampton's "Silverheels", which was more of a thrill than I thought it would be. I had only seen it serialized by Pacific Comics. The original watercolors were really beautiful.
If you'd like to see a wider range of Doug Smith's own beautiful artwork, below is a link to:
his own page on Behance .
