Bob Pepper Art: Adult Fantasy And Vinyl Covers

You can see American artist Bob Pepper’s (October 23, 1938—January 16, 2019) illustrations on record and paperback covers for Elektra Records’ Nonesuch and Checkmate labels, notably on Love’s 1967 Forever Changes album. Ballentine books’ Adult Fantasy series and game artwork made from the 1960s into the 1980s.

Ballentine hired Pepper to illustrate covers for their Adult Fantasy book series from 1969 to 1974. The publishers had enjoyed success with a print of J.R.R. Tolkein’s The Lord of the Rings. His covers included A Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay, and books by Lord Dunsany, James Branch Cabell, Joy Chant, Evangeline Walton and Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy, plus a series of Philip K. Dick covers for DAW Books in the 1980s.

 

 

“My technique is to cement down charcoal paper, float water into areas of the illustration, and border the area with dark gouache which spreads and settles in the warpings of the wet paper. After that dries flat, I float dyes on top to color the area.

“I love the whole process of illustration, but mostly the research and bringing together of many different parts to form a coherent whole design that I like. I also think that your state of mind, (what interests you) has, really, everything to do with it!”

– Bob Pepper

 

Bob Pepper Cover Art for Isaac Asimov’s ‘Lucky Starr’ Series (1971 –1972)

 

 

Originally published between 1952 and 1958 under the pseudonym Paul French, Isaac Asimov’s Lucky Star series details the exploits of David “Lucky” Starr, a prototypical pulp hero waging prototypical Cold War-era, “Us vs. Them” adventures. The books were originally intended as the basis for a children’s television series, a sort of science-fictional Lone Ranger, but the project was abandoned when a competing network started developing Rocky Jones, Space Ranger (1954). Signet released the first paperback editions of the series, and the first editions under Asimov’s own name, in 1971 and 1972, clearly intending to lure the growing science fiction community—by now largely resistant to black and white morality tales—with Bob Pepper’s radiant, kinetic images. – We are Mutants

 

 

 

 

 

Although Pepper had been a professional illustrator since 1962, it was his distinctive bright charcoals on the cover of Love’s Forever Changes (1967) that captured the visual zeitgeist and caught the eye of science fiction and fantasy publisher Ballantine Books. Starting with the reprint of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy (1968), Pepper would go on to illustrate several volumes of Ballantine’s influential Adult Fantasy series (1969-1974), as well as a series of

 

Bob Pepper’s Illustrations for Philip K. Dick editions for DAW in 1983-1984.

 

Bob Peppers illustrated covers for a series of Philip K. Dick editions for DAW in 1983-1984.

 

 

Bob Pepper was born in 1938 in Los Angeles. He studied advertising an illustration at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. He moved to New York in the early 1960s, where Pepper established himself as a commercial artist. In 1981, he created the artwork for the Milton Bradley card game Dragonmaster, and their electronic board game, Dark Tower.

 

 

Via: Ragged Claws,