lightsail design

A work in progress. Just one in a series

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.

Darkside: Horror For the Next millennium
Written by John Pelan
A.D Richard Hasselberger ( Hey Rich what’s the deal give me a call)
cover art by David Loew

I bet you remember the good old days, the end of the world was coming. If your older then twelve I bet you do. People where digging bunkers, saving up food, and buying guns. Everybody was talking about how all the computers would fail, hospitals would go dark and we would sink into a new dark age. If it wasn’t that it was the coming of armageddon, the fulfillment of all the biblical prophecies, four horsemen and all.

Ok I did buy some firewood so I could survive the winter but it was on sale.

I received the assignment for this book cover in the spring of 1997. I had just moved back to Chicago a year earlier from New Haven Connecticut. I had just broken up with my girlfriend and was having a wild affair with a beautiful blond Russian. . Ahh… the good old days

David Loew

From the publisher:

Prepare yourself for a chilling excursion to the dark side of fiction through the most frightening places that linger just beyond the imagination. With its haunting tales of dread that will stab an icy shaft of fear straight into your very soul, Darkside: Horror For the Next

Millennium

is modern macabre fiction at its very best. Welcome to the new definition of terror…. Features tales by Bram Stoker Award winners Edward Lee , Jack Ketchum, and Elizabeth Massey, and two-time Bram Stoker Award Lucy Taylor. Also contains stories by such noted authors as CaitlÆn R. Kiernan, Wayne Edwards, Adam-Troy Castro, Thomas Ligotti, Robert Petitt, Lauren Fitzgerald, K.K. Ormond, Sean Doolittle, Steve Rasnic Tem, Sue Storm, D.F. Lewis, Roman Ranieri, Christa Faust, Brian McNaughton, S. Darnbrook Colson, Alan M. Clark,Jeffrey Osier, Yvonne Navarro, Deirdra Cox, James S. Dorr, Brian Hodge,Larry Tritten, Roberta Lannes, Wayne Allen Sallee, t. Winter Damon,RandyChandler, Robert Jo Levy, and David Bo Silva