Cover Artist

The Cover Artist

A true story by Erick Sahler

In what now feels like another lifetime, I went to work for the local newspaper. I was 22, fresh out of college without a lick of journalism experience. I went oh-for-three on the spelling test the Managing Editor administered to prospective hires. I’m certain I got the job because I was the only one who knew their way around the pricey new Apple Macintosh computer corporate had recently installed in the Salisbury newsroom.

Initially, my duties were to create graphics and illustrations, mostly for the lifestyle section of the paper, including the cover of the “Weekend” entertainment supplement.

After a couple months, I picked up enough about copy editing and page design to be given the responsibility of Weekend Editor. On Mondays and Tuesdays, I prepared the inside pages with stories and photos about upcoming events, band listings and movie reviews. Then on Wednesday mornings, I’d go into work and illustrate the cover of that week’s edition.

The composition for the cover was left up to me. It had to be family-friendly and fun — the cover story always promoted the biggest event of the week ahead. They were mostly local functions — the festival circuit, car and boat shows, symphony concerts and drama club performances — but a couple times a year I got to illustrate national touring acts — Willie Nelson, Lyle Lovett, Jay Leno and Tears for Fears — who were performing nearby. I also had fun with the Oscars and the Grammys, including one year when I drew MC Hammer, Sinead O’Connor, Billy Idol and a host of other pop music stars gathered around my grandmother’s rocking chair. Grammy, get it? It was high concept.

For research — there was no internet to Google images in those days — the newsroom had a set of World Book encyclopedias from the 1950s. They were pretty useless except for the most general topics. Fortunately, our office was a block from the county library, where there were lots of books and a copier I could use to bring smeary high-contrast black-and-white images back to the newsroom for reference.

Try to imagine this week’s cover story is about the National Muskrat Skinning Contest, a real event held every February in Dorchester County, and you need to draw a muskrat on deadline. Even if you can picture a muskrat in your head, can you draw it well enough to put before 30,000 readers?

So I came to know my way around the library pretty well, including where to find muskrat photos.

The deadline clock was always ticking.

I’d go from concept to research to rough sketch to final drawing in a day’s time.

Often I stayed late into the night, inking away as the last editors put the Thursday paper to bed, leaving me alone in the empty newsroom.

I remember one time biting off more than I could chew with an illustration for a kite festival in Ocean City. I drew a bird’s-eye view of a couple kites close in the foreground, then down below I began illustrating the Inlet and the Boardwalk, with every structure looking north as far as the eye could see. I drew tiny little buildings for hours and hours — once I started there was no option but to keep going.

On Thursdays, I’d cut separations for the cyan, magenta and yellow plates using a color wheel to dial in the process-color formulas for all the colors in the illustration. Then each area was masked with rubylith film or a Zipatone screen pattern, which I hand-cut with an Xacto knife. It was delicate work that took several hours, and there was no way to proof it before it went to the press.

Of course, it was always a crap shoot with our old Goss Cosmo, a spot-color press that had been jury-rigged to print process color. I could generally trust it to produce primary and secondary colors. Making brown, which requires percentages of all four process colors, was dicey. One time I illustrated Patti LaBelle and her skin printed every shade from green to purple to orange. Everything but brown.

Creating those covers was stressful and tedious, and I did it every week for five years, producing more than 250 covers back-to-back-to-back on deadline.

In hindsight, it was a blessing to be offered such an opportunity. For many years, the Weekend covers were how people knew me. I performed a high-wire act, and mostly I survived.

Somewhere along the way, my grandmother gave me a framed print of Norman Rockwell’s “Blank Canvas” from the Oct. 8, 1938, Saturday Evening Post. In it he painted himself, seated at his easel before a blank Saturday Evening Post cover, and scratches his head as his “Due Date” looms.

I once sketched myself in a parody of Rockwell’s “Blank Canvas” for a never-published Weekend cover. I had saved the idea to develop when and if no other idea should come, but the years passed then I took another position in the newsroom, then another, and so it never got used.

Rockwell was my childhood hero, and I knew my mother’s copy of the book “Norman Rockwell: Illustrator” inside and out. I’ve recently been reading his autobiography, “My Life as an Illustrator.” It’s a fascinating account of what he went through — the challenges, the doubts, the critics and eventually the satisfaction of all those years creating Saturday Evening Post covers.

In my own small way, I can relate — and it makes me admire him all the more.

I once sketched myself in a parody of Norman Rockwell’s “Blank Canvas” for a never-published Weekend cover.