Larry Rostant’s domestic bliss for an atomic age
Digital artist Larry Rostant has submitted Domestic Goddess to our current Photography Annual 2014 competition, a cheery, mutated vision of 1950s femininity that Rostant created as a promotional project. It’s great in so many ways: concept, lighting, execution. The bounce light and shadows from arm to arm sell it.
Rostant is as much a digital illustrator as a digital photographer, a go-to guy for photo-based fantasy, crime and historical fiction cover art. He does romance novel covers, he does naval history book covers, and he hit the career jackpot doing a 2003 revamp of the Game of Thrones covers before GoT was a thing beyond its initial fandom. His Art Directors hail from HarperCollins, Voyager, Angry Robot, and Orbit. His process is entirely 21st century:
I build an image out of lots and lots of bits of different photographs. In any cover, there could be up to 50 different images put together. For instance, if it was a picture of someone running down a hill, I’d use different bits of hair, different bits of arms and different bits of fingers all put together to create the quintessential perfect representation of someone running down a hill. ~ An Interview with Larry Rostant, Mike Shackle, Fantasy Faction.
To pull this off seamlessly — blending dramatic light, shadow, skin color, artifacts, environmental color, digits — is a craft requiring a strong sense of anatomy and an intense preciseness. Over the years he’s acquired a large client base that implicitly trusts him to deliver technical excellence. Do a Google image search. There are a lot of covers.
Rostant previously submitted Summer to our Photography Annual 2013 competition and book, for which he was awarded Gold.
The Photography Annual 2014 competition features the freakiest, most compelling and influential photography of the year. Prizes consist of Gold and Platinum awards, with winning entries published in a big, pretty 256-page Best of Photography 2014 Annual.
To submit your own mutant work to the Photography Annual 2014 competition, click HERE. The final deadline is October 4, 2013. This time we’re serious.
To check out more work by Larry Rostant, click here.
