• Today I have been looking at a recently published book, Famous Monster Movie Art of Basil Gogos. Basil Gogos painted many of the covers for Jim Warren's Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine. Anyone who was a monster kid in the 60's will recognize these images. His painting has that glorious journeyman commercial art style from the mid 20th century. Flat layers of quick flat brush strokes building the form and thinner painted stroked backgrounds add interest, light and vibrancy without adding any time consuming, unnecessary details to the art.

One of the most characteristic elments in his monster covers is his unusual use of color. He prefered to work with black and white photos for reference, for the values and form, and to add his own color in a way he had never seen done before. He imagined the heads lit with , "... four different colors and one from the background... it was a portrait lit in five lights." It is only the faces that get this spotlighted color treatment. There isn't any unnatural color on the torso. It is almost more like the color is glowing from within.