EXTRACTS: The Art of Denis McLoughlin © 2013 The Book Palace (272 PAGES in Full edition)

54 the few covers done in oils, which were 100% up. Most of the designs done during the War, and while Audrey Weir was in complete charge, were of a three strip format, the title taking up the top third of the cover, then the il- lustration in the middle with the bottom third used for the author’s name. This was Miss Weir’s idea and they were easy designs to produce, as only one third of the cover was an illustration, the remaining two thirds being lettering on a flat background of poster colour. There were exceptions to this format, The Blood Remembers being one such. The illustrated portion of these covers were in water colour with, I believe, one exception - this be- ing a picture of Mississippi river boats. I must add that a certain amount of body colour was used to “clean up” these water colours. Never liked water colour, as it mostly looks spineless (also, I wasn’t very good at it!). But I loved Russell Flint’s water colours - and McConnell’s. When I came to paint the full-page cover designs for the Boardman Bloodhounds , however, things were very different. I rarely used water col- our and, if I did, it was usually combined with other materials. Much has been said about my airbrushed covers, but, in fact, there were very few of these. At Ward & Copley we had used little else but airbrush for our cata- logue illustration, but cutting stencils was not my idea of fun and so I used my airbrush frugally, mainly for gradated skies on the odd cover and for tinting a whole background. Waterproof ink was used on these exercises as it didn’t “lift” when doing the lettering and it also gave a slight “tooth” to the board, which was ideal when using Derwent pencils. Many of the