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Nuts & Bolts: David Palumbo

November 17, 2008 This week's Nuts & Bolts interviewee is illustrator David Palumbo, whose highly detailed paintings have adorned countless genre book jackets. He frequently tosses in overt classical references as well as subtle genre and industry in-jokes; most recently, he used Tor art director Irene Gallo as the model for one of the zombies adorning the cover of John Joseph Adams's anthology The Living Dead (Night Shade, September 2008). I asked David about the beautiful and delightfully incongruous cover art he supplied for Harry Turtledove's After the Downfall (Night Shade, July 2008); the image of a Nazi officer on a unicorn is closely modeled on Jacques-Louis David's paintings of Napoleon Crossing the Alps.

Genreville: Where did the After the Downfall cover concept come from? What attracted you to it?

David Palumbo: The concept was already in place when I was contacted for the job.  The publisher asked me to parody the David painting but with a German infantry officer on a unicorn, and it was left to me beyond that.  As far as what attracted me to it, there were several reasons but the main one was the idea of recreating the Napoleon portrait.  It's always a learning experience to do a master copy and I really enjoyed closely studying David's painting while working on this.  Besides that, I'd never painted a unicorn before, so that was fun, and it's also exciting to work with a new client (this being the first job that I did for Night Shade).

GV: What challenges did you face while creating the cover and getting it approved?

DP: The most obvious challenge was to do some sort of justice to the original painting.  I wanted to match it as closely as possible, so I had a full sized poster of it hanging next to my easel the entire way through. That way I could really pick it apart and compare with mine.  I also had to do some research to make sure that my German's uniform was historically accurate.  Getting approval wasn't a challenge at all, I think everyone was very pleased with how it turned out.

GV: How did it inspire or discourage you? How is that experience affecting your current and future projects?

DP: I hate to sound like a broken record, but just studying the David painting was very inspiring.  There were so many details which I never would have noticed without such an intense study.  I almost felt like I was back in school!  I've tried to carry that with me into all of my projects which have followed.

Next week's Nuts & Bolts will feature Toni Weisskopf, the publisher of Baen Books, discussing the acquisition, editing, and marketing of Steve White's Saint Antony's Fire (November 2008).

Posted by Rose Fox on November 17, 2008 | Comments (0)