I’m a frustrated artist. I was into both painting and writing when I was a kid. When the time came to pick a college, I rolled the dice and went with a writing major. Guess it turned out okay, but I’m still strongly attracted to art of all kinds, especially illustrations. It’s a great form—often representational, but still demanding technical mastery.

A few months back, I did a post for SleuthSayers about how mystery writers can actually own a piece of art that once graced their stories in major mystery magazines. This is somewhat inside baseball, I admit, but it shakes down like this:

In the mystery genre, the two biggest magazines in the business are Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Both are published by Dell Magazines, which also pubs the SFF magazines, Analog and Asimov’s. Budgets are tight for these kinds of magazines but these four do manage to spend a little money on illustrations in each issue.

I suspect that the cover art (the images I’m posting here, for example) are images licensed from stock photo agencies.

But the interior art tends to be custom-created for whichever story is being singled out for special treatment. (Not all stories get art.)

I discovered quite by accident that if an artist creates an original piece of work to illustrate a story that you submit and sell to one of these magazines, you can very easily contact the artist and ask to buy a copy of the work to stick up on your wall. I’ve since bought at least two pieces of work that accompanied my stories when they first ran.

You can find out more at a SleuthSayers post entitled:

Filling the Blank Walls in My Life

Most illustrations these days are generated digitally, not by hand. But to acquire a decent work of art, I think you want to stay within a reasonable size when you ask the illustrator to print one out for you. (They’ll know the ideal size to avoid losing resolution.) You will want them to print it on decent stock paper, and sign it. Otherwise, it’s not much of a keepsake.

But I deal with those minor points in the post.

Image of Beethoven’s bust by me.