#bruce pennington

[haaaaaaaaaaaave-you-met-ted]

Eastern Shore by Bruce Pennington

[adesantis]

Title: The Two Colors of Retro Sci-Fi: Bruce Pennington’s Children of Tomorrow (1973)

Body Text: Why does the exact same painting look completely different depending on where you look it up? This isn't a modern digital filter. It’s a fascinating example of how 1970s print technology altered sci-fi art.

Consider the two radically different editions:

The Bright Original (The Canvas): This version reveals Bruce Pennington’s true color palette. He utilized vibrant sky gradients, clean blues, and bright pinks to create a surreal, dreamlike alien atmosphere.

The Dark Alternative (The 1973 Paperback): This is how millions of readers actually encountered the artwork in bookstores. Mass-production printing presses back then often over-saturated cyan and black inks. Printed on cheap, absorbent pulp paper, the pinks vanished, the blues shifted into a muddy moss green, and the scene grew darker and gloomier.

Putting them side by side shows how a technical printing flaw completely redefined the mood of the art. The artist painted an alien dream, but the printing press manufactured a dark, dystopian mystery.

[atomiccollectionanchorme]

Art by Bruce Pennington "Eastern Shore", 1989

[sandmandaddy69]

bruce pennington

[alovelywaytospendanevening]

The Horror Horn: The Best Horror Stories of E. F. Benson, released in 1974 by Panther.

Stories selected by Alexis Lykiard. Cover illustration by Bruce Pennington.

[atomiccollectionanchorme]

A classic Bruce Pennington work, used as a 1973 cover to 'Children of Tomorrow,' by A. E. van Vogt.

[spacenoirdetective]

Bruce Pennington, cover art for "A Scent of New-Mown Hay" by John Blackburn, 1968

Review quote from Valancourt Books:

"With a plot featuring Cold War intrigue, Nazi mad scientists, and a pandemic that threatens to destroy humanity by mutating people into fungoid monsters, it is not hard to see why A Scent of New-Mown Hay (1958) became a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic and an instant science-fiction classic. After a British ship’s crew and a remote Russian village are wiped out in mysterious and horrible fashion, General Charles Kirk of British Foreign Intelligence sets out to investigate. As the plague spreads to England, Kirk’s frantic search leads him from the desolate tundra of Russia to the ruins of a Nazi camp, the site of unthinkable wartime atrocities. But who is responsible? Is it a Soviet experiment gone horribly wrong, the work of a depraved madman, or something else entirely? And can it be stopped?"

[dreamsrecurring]