A Talk About Art with W Fraser Sandercombe
The first thing I ever saw that started me on the road to ruin — I mean, the road to wanting to create art — was a Disney film with artwork so dark and rich that it made me feel a strange sort of longing. Yearning. I was young and wasn’t aware of what that feeling meant until I discovered I could draw. Not perfectly, of course, but it was obvious that I could learn.
And I did.
It took a lot of work and wasted reams of paper. But the skill developed. And I thought, what the hell, if I can learn to draw, then I can learn to paint. And I did that, too. (At the same time, I was learning to write — mostly horror stories.)
In the beginning, the attempt to create art had no direction. I worked at landscapes, portraits, cowboys, girls… Virtually anything you could see, I tried to paint. Hell, I even painted a horrible bowl of fruit once. Then I saw a painting by Frank Frazetta, one that really hit me. I had noticed some of his earlier stuff when he was doing the Tarzan paintings for Ace Books. But those covers didn’t have the power of that first one he did for Lancer, Conan the Adventurer.
W Fraser Sandercombe Follows His Inspiration
After I saw that, I hunted for more Frazetta stuff and found Creepy and Eerie Magazines with his dark fantasy covers. And then along came Jeff Jones, another terrific fantasy painter. Jones had been influenced by Frazetta, but he had his own style, somewhat more ethereal and softer yet quite powerful. Then I discovered Virgil Finlay and his incredible ink work.
And that was it. It was time to get into some fantasy. If those three artists could all work in fantasy and all have their own styles, then maybe I could do it, too.
Some of the very early stuff was quite imitative, muscular barbaric warriors, et cetera. But after some hard work, my own style began to evolve. Weirdbook and Eerie Country Magazines started to use some of my drawings, which was very encouraging. And then galleries started selling my paintings. It doesn’t get much more encouraging than that.
The painting accompanying this was a somewhat early effort. And the original was sold in Montreal in the mid-seventies.
You May Be Interested in These W. Fraser Sandercombe Stock Art Products
Check out the full stock art catalog of W Fraser Sandercombe.
Steven Trustrum
Steven Trustrum has been writing in the RPG industry since the end of the '90s and publishing via Misfit Studios since 2003. Aside from writing and publishing role-playing game content, he ... dabbles ... in content and social media marketing.