lightsail design

Reflections is part of an ongoing series of post apocalypse images I am working on.

I had recently moved from Chicago to the bucolic community of Woodlake Ct. This story was excerpted from a letter I had written to a friend back home.

Hey Bob, you’re going to love this. I am currently working on two illustrations, Intruder in the Wind and Bounty Hunter Blues. For Intruder, I needed a couple models, a crazy militia type dressed in camo gear and a baby. The most difficult one to get was of course the baby. Now as you know I’ve only lived in Woodbury a few months. This is not NYC and I don’t have an extensive model file here and as always I’m under a deadline, so, in a panic.
I’ve called everyone I know for leads on a baby three to four months old. It didn’t take to long to figure out I was on my own with this one. I asked the girls at the art supply store and at the Woodlake office, I even asked the woman who cleaned my rug if she knew of any cute babies.
After having no luck for several days I found myself at an outdoor fair. A Taste of Woodbury, that featured antiques, roast beef sandwiches and a collection of classic cars. As I wondered through the fair it dawned on me, “Gee there are lots of mothers with babies here.”
For women or couples you can go around staring at babies all you like. But a single guy, your going to get yourself noticed. Moms and dads really have their antennas out for suspicious people.
There I was. Surreptitiously trying to glance at the babies in their strollers and in their mother’s arms. Trying to decide if they were cute, too fat, or just plug ugly. A few times I walked up to the moms and asked them how old their babies were, standing there, using the time to get a better look at the little buggers, feeling stupid and uncomfortable. There had been one that I had seen a couple of times that I thought might be acceptable. I kept trying to get a better look, but I really didn’t want to get arrested. I decided that the direct approach was going to be the most credible.
I introduced myself trying my best to seem professional and disarmingly charming. I know that was a stretch but I was desperate. After telling them where I lived and given them my phone number and who the publisher was and what the story was about and offering $100 for an hours work. They decided to put away their misgiving and we made an appointment for four the next day. But my day was hardly done I had scheduled a photo shoot for 4:00 and that was just a couple of hours away.
One of the props I needed for the shoot was a gun. Realism is always best, so I had arranged to borrow one from a friend who was a collector.
Lee my model arrived on time and we got right down to business. I had the lights set up and a black backdrop. After a while I decided that I was going to take advantage of the natural light so we moved outside to the back porch. Lee was posed with his back to the house as if standing guard.
While we were shooting I had forgot that I was boiling water for coffee until I heard the shrill scream of my teakettle. What I didn’t know was that I had visitors and that’s what they heard as well. Wood lake as the name suggests was a development build in a wood on rolling hills overlooking the Lake. The condo I was living in was set on sloping land with a steep muddy path that winds around the house to the back porch. Apparently while I was running upstairs to turn off the boiling water the father of the baby I was scheduled to shoot the next day was knocking at my door. While I was upstairs he was making his way around to the back porch to see if any body was home.
What he found of course was a strange guy wearing my Miami Vice jacket holding a 45 caliber semi-automatic hand gun trying to look like a hit man. Now I wasn’t there, but I would have given anything to see the look on his face. After all he was checking me out to see if I was legit. It must have been in one moment the culmination of all of his worst fears. When I came down the two of them were frozen in a puzzled tableau. The baby’s father had the face of a deer staring into the headlight of an oncoming car. He struggled to regain his composure and explained his visit. I did my best to assuage his fears and regain my flagging credibility.
I dragged him into the basement studio just off my porch and desperately pointed to the drawing board, art supplies, and photography equipment scattered about the room. I got a brilliant Idea. I looked around the room and for a book cover I’d worked on. With a feeling of triumph I leafed through the book to find the credits. I shoved it under his nose, see, I did that see…. There’s my name David Loew. But it wasn’t there, someone else’s name was. The book cover had somehow been credited to another artist.
He had the look of someone trapped in a conversation with a devil worshipper.
I got a call a couple hours after he left. It seems he had decided to take a pass at the wonderful opportunity of having his daughter grace the cover of a mystery novel. Apparently he had come to the conclusion that I was speaking a little to literally when I told him I wanted to shoot his daughter.
The story did have a happy ending because Lee my hit man had a friend, who had a perfectly lovely baby, available the very next day. So that’s my story of the baby and the hit man, hope you liked it.

I’m working on a series of post apocalypse pieces. The different elements are being created using a combination of images created in a 3d program and photography that gives a crisp sense of realism to the fantasy.

In my last few posts I’ve written about my recent work so today I thought I’d talk a little about one of my older pieces. Anna’s Book by Ruth Rendell, writing as Barbara Vine, published by New American Library in 1994.

The art director was George Cornell, I believe he’s retired, his place has been taken by Richard Hasselberger. One of the great things about George was that he gave me projects to work on in styles that weren’t represented in my portfolio.

Anna’s Book is a perfect example of this. My original layout was a photorealistic montage of images from the book. George looked at this and decided we needed to go in a new direction. In my former life as a fine artist my medium of choice was oils. At the time I had gotten the assignment I hadn’t worked on an oil painting in 10 years.

The background was created using photos of old London as reference and the foreground figure of the woman with baby carriage was shot with a model in a studio in New York. A lot of attention was paid to the detail of the costume so that it was historically accurate.

The painting was finished fairly quickly in about a week, and I haven’t done another oil painting since. I worked on several other books by Ruth Rendell including “king Solomon’s Carpet” and “No Night is Too Long” which was done a couple years later, in the style of “Anna’s Book, but all done using Photoshop and Painter.

From Publishers Weekly

From the pen of Edgar-winner Ruth Rendell’s suspense-writing doppleganger Vine ( A Dark-Adapted Eye ) comes a sixth adroitly fashioned novel of insidious psychological dimensions. Anna, an uncompromising Danish wife stranded by her husband in 1905 London, slyly scribbles tales of her hateful neighbors, boorish servant and absentee spouse while awaiting the birth of a baby. Half a century later, prompted by a poison pen letter, Anna tells her favorite daughter Swanny a half-riddle about her true parentage, but refuses to reveal the whole story, which is entangled with the murder of two women and the disappearance of a toddler. After frantically searching Anna’s many diaries for clues to no avail, Swanny publishes them to great acclaim; after Swanny dies, her niece Ann picks up the thread binding three generations and families and follows it to a neatly executed conclusion. Vine skillfully braids the lives of the three women, but it is Anna’s voice–puckish, angry, mysterious–that commands attention as fat red herrings are dangled, then tossed. While not as taut and chilling as Vine’s–or Rendell’s–best books, a mordant eye and textured accounts of turn-of-the-century London lend this novel a sharp edge.

Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. –This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

The most difficult part of this assignment was finding the right model. The instructions were very simple but very specific.

The main character is a 14-year-old girl. She has short, spiky brown hair, blue eyes, and pale skin. She should be attractive, but not model-perfect.

Sounds simple enough, I thought this was going to be a breeze. I’m in Chicago and there are plenty of modeling agencies around. Apparently what there is not a lot of is 14 year old girls with short hair.

I literally went through all the major agencies in Chicago, started at the top working my way down the list. It soon became clear to me that finding this quirky girl was going to pose more of a problem then I originally had assumed.

I even went around some suburban malls handing out flyers and offering a finders fee. I sent in photos of a number of potential girls and I thought I got close.

Craigs list saved the day. One of the many emails I got was actually from the mother of a fifteen year old girl who fit the bill and was 0ultimately approved.

The shoot itself went well. The only real challenge was to get 4 distinct looks that would be appropriate for 4 different covers. With this I go help from my hair and makeup stylist Ashley Vest.

Here is one the covers with post work done by the art director Tim Hall at Scholastic. Here are some of the shots I presented.

Chasing Yesterday Awakening

by Robin Wasserman ,

(Mass Market Paperback)

Publisher: Scholastic Inc.

Cover art David Loew

Art Direction: Tim Hall

The Best Teen Books in ‘07–Part 2

A work in progress. Just one in a series

This is cover artwork is for a novel that I am writing (Inside Outside) speculative fiction. Of course I have the cover finished before the book. The image was created in Bryce with a little help from Photoshop to clean it up, below is an excerpt.

There was a crisp wind and dead leaves swirled around his feet as Carl Grauer descended the long curved stairwell that had been for years the main entrance to the Greenwalk. Looking up he saw, carved in Stone above the stairway, the familiar legend, Chicago World Exhibition Erected 2020. He took off his gloves and put them in the pocket of his coat, as he stepped slowly down the stairs into the sea of human flotsam. All around him was the insectile buzz of a thousand voices; the scraping, shifting and shuffling of feet. They were to him a blur of colors and shapes, a pulsing mindless stream of movement in a canyon of fetid air. He walked among them silently observing.

Before him, displayed in meticulous detail, was a replica of S. Halted Street Circa 1920 under a huge dome of midnight blue. He stopped in front of a shoe repair shop with a faded green and white-stripped awning. Through the window he could see a small bald man bent over a workbench surrounded by old shoes who seemed to be working feverishly. Next to him was Capon’s Italian restaurant complete with the strains of Rigoletto from an ancient radio mixed with the tangy smell of red sauce and a hundred years of spilt wine; and on the corner was the Capesie Brothers Confection were two grim face men in tee-shirt argued loudly. He walked with care on the slick cobblestone street past a German bakery, a hardware store past a man selling hot dogs and roasted chestnuts from a pushcart. Most of the displays had been sold at the close of the fair and turned into the business they had been built to represent, but some like the hardware store had been saved to add texture to the street.

One of the best draws for the street was the recently upgraded holograph of a gangster style drive by shooting. Twice each evening at 7 and 9 a portion of the street and sidewalk erupted in nonstop carnage as a heavily armed 1924 Cadillac swept round the corner from nowhere; Bodies fell limp, blood gushed and guns blazed. Because it was popular to dress in period, you could always tell the holographs from the real people when the holographs ran for cover; the audience loved it.

Carl didn’t wait for the performance but walked further down the green walk. The holographs, ghostlike and translucent, had been integrated into each scene in such a way as to seem an almost natural part of the street. The woman with the tight red dress and the man in a broad brimmed hat stood locked in a endless conversation haunting the diner they stood before.

As he continued beyond the original site of the exhibition, the odd street changed in character. Gone was the continuity of city planning, in it place was wild growth. Antique shops stood next to topless bars, VR-cades and coffee shops.

Copyright © David Loew 2007

You can see more of my work at www.Chicagoprintgallery.com

You can see more of my work at www.Chicagoprintgallery.com

Flopped Chopped and Channelled

The Boneyard Café,

This piece evolved out of a series I was working on that had a post apocalyptic feel to it. I was working with large textured abstract shapes against the most ordinary of environment. In this case a diner.

One of my earliest influences was Rod Serling. He knew that our reality exists within a very narrow spectrum and that the slightest shift sets us adrift.

If we change the context of our life we slip into the surreal.

Dawn of the Vampire
by William Hill
Cover artwork by David Loew

I received the assignment for Dawn of the Vampire in the spring of 1989. This was not the first horror book cover that I’ve done but it is one of my favorites and my first Vampire book cover.

The technique was a combination of photography, darkroom maneuvers and acrylic airbrush.

I was living on a lake, in Woodbury, a bucolic town snuggled in the rolling hills of Connecticut, quintessential Americana.

The art direction was simple and straightforward. Give me a vampire rising out of the water with a full moon on the horizon and make it scarry.

My biggest Challenge was finding the right model. This was not something I could shoot in a studio in NYC. So I looked for a model among my friends and neighbors. I had been living in Connecticut for less then a year so friends where few and far between. I had gotten to know a few locals at my favorite diner, Laurel Café, named after the former owner.

The current owner and my favorite waitress was Jody. She was in her thirties with blond hair, a ruddy complexion and German good looks. It was her friends and family that made me feel at home.

One of her friends was a big handsome kid with dark hair with the coolest car I’ve ever seen. It was a hotrod that had been flopped, chopped, and channeled. Roy was a professional bull rider. In fact it seems Jody grew up on a horse ranch so she new a lot of cowboys. Her mother was even a barrel racer.

Ok back to Dawn of the Vampire. Jody was having a party at her house so I talked Roy into getting into the water and took some pretty interesting pictures.. Some how they all looked more like Return of the Living Dead, just not quite right.

My next victum was a friend of mine, a jazz musician, who was up visiting from Chicago. He had a long laconic face, big hands and slender fingers.. I prepared for the shoot by dressing him up with fake fingernails and painted his face and hands white.

He backed into the cold lake water at dusk and I followed with my camera careful to keep it dry. This time the light was perfect and the shots came out better then I expected.

Many thanks to Mark Krumich still playing Jazz in clubs around Miami.