Amber cover art

[winkingbishop]

Sorry for crossing the river into the Amber threads, but perhaps you guys could help me out;  I own a handful of the Amber novels, Avon paperbacks, and wondered if you knew who the cover artist was.

[Lizard Mixture]

I believe that is the work of Ron Walotsky, who also did covers of Lords of Light and Creatures of Light and Darkness for Avon paperbacks in that style as well.

[finarvyn]

You are correct. Walotsky also did a portfolio of some of the cover artwork, which you can sometimes find on e-bay.

[winkingbishop]

That's interesting. Looking at the Walotsky art I found during a casual interweb search, I wouldn't have connected the dots.  I appreciate your guys observations though.

For what it's worth, I'll tell you what really piqued my interest about the whole thing.  It's hard to put into words, but that weird acid-trip genre of art that is on my Amber books reminded me of a board game that I played in my youth called Dark Tower.

The Dark Tower bits were illustrated by Bob Pepper.  It has a similar strangely primal quality that always influences my imagination when I read Amber.  Please do yourself a favor and take a look at the art for this game:

http://well-of-souls.com/tower/index.html

And to really understand why I associate it with Amber, check out Bob Pepper's art for the card game Dragonmaster:

http://well-of-souls.com/tower/dmaster.htm (click on the individual suit links from here!)

Deck of cards, Tarot...anyway, you get the idea.  I hope it inspires some games for you guys.  I love the artwork.

[Lizard Mixture]

It took a bit of research to figure out that Walotsky was the artist for those covers, as his style changes considerably over the years.  In fact, when I first ran across a citation of Walotsky being the artist, I thought it must have been for another printing of the Avon editions of the Amber books as what I could find of Walotsky's art online just didn't strike me as being at all similar, but further mention in different contexts verified it was, in fact, his work.

I wasn't aware of Bob Pepper's art for the Dark Tower game, so I'm glad that you mentioned it since I'm quite fond of his art.

Interesting connection between Walotsky and Pepper:  they both did cover art for the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series from the early 70s.  Walotsky did the cover for Fletcher Pratt's The Blue Star, while Pepper created about a dozen for the series, including the covers for Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast novels and several of the James Branch Cabell books in the series.

A gallery of all the BAF covers can be seen at:  http://www.skwishmi.com/interests/baf.html

[winkingbishop]

A gallery of all the BAF covers can be seen at:  http://www.skwishmi.com/interests/baf.html

Great link, thanks.

[ChaosDrgn]

http://www.pbase.com/kathye/image/44000680

Not a cover, interesting picture though. Corwin coming up to the Courts of Chaos.

[jibbajibba]

This is another that was done as an Amber image but ended up as a Marion Zimmer Bradley cover for a different book.

http://www.fantasy-illustration.com/illustration/hellride_illustration.html

Good drawing.

[gabriel_ss4u]

A gallery of all the BAF covers can be seen at:  http://www.skwishmi.com/interests/baf.html

Great link, thanks!