Talk:Roy Krenkel

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Image:Roy Krenkel Jr.jpg is being used on this article. I notice the image page specifies that the image is being used under fair use but there is no explanation or rationale as to why its use in this Wikipedia article constitutes fair use. In addition to the boilerplate fair use template, you must also write out on the image description page a specific explanation or rationale for why using this image in each article is consistent with fair use.

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BetacommandBot (talk) 04:52, 24 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

there are countless doodles, sketches, prelims, ink studies, tonal comparisons and color comps of all shapes and sizes of the same concepts and assignments again and again in Roy's oeuvre. he loved the "idea" sketch and doing portfolios and fanzines.

I think it'd be a good idea to add his artwork, here is a good place to start https://www.comicartfans.com/searchresult.asp?txtsearch=Roy%20Krenkel

alot of his finished works/books are out of print which is a shame, I think Roy is often overlooked.

So appreciative was Frazetta of Roy's tutelage on the conan series of books, that in an unprecedented gesture, Roy is acknowledged on every single copy of every edition of the first four Conan cover assignments that Frank turned in: "With grateful acknowledgment to Roy G. Krenkel, advisor."

This begs the question: exactly what was Roy advising Frank to do? Yes, Roy was an enthusiastic reader of all of Robert E. Howard's writings, particularly Conan, and it's been documented that Roy shared his enthusiasm of Conan and his world with Frank, but does it go further than that?

Krenkel's success with ACE led to more work than he wished to handle so he called to his good friend Frank Frazetta for assistance. Frazetta assisted him on the Tarzan the Invincible, Back To The Stone Age, and The Mastermind of Mars ACE paperback covers. After a series of well-received collaborative paperback covers, Krenkel suggested that Don Wollheim hire Frazetta. Wollheim was reluctant but Krenkel convinced him, "You gotta get this guy, Frazetta. He is different!" "I did the first few covers by myself, and then somewhere down the line, maybe the fourth one, if memory serves, I dragged Frank in to helping me with the difficult areas. Not so much with the idea, but the painting, which Frank could do and I couldn’t. When he would help me, Frank’s problem was to try and make it look like mine. It was very difficult for him to attempt to confine himself to my rigid, dull style at that time. Frank would paint the hair, and work out how lighting would go across a face, or a hand, he picked up the color…little details, highlights. He knew just how to “pop it.” When I would get to an area that I was unsure of, and didn’t want to kill the thing at that point, I’d say, “you’d better take it, Frank.” And, he would dutifully try to keep it as rigid as the rest of the damn stuff. I didn’t know, for instance, how an eye would go when the head was tipped down. I couldn’t figure out where it would be dark and where it would be light. Frank knew all this, and he had great control, which I didn’t have. I was pretty sloppy in those days, and am getting sloppier now."  

A few years later, Krenkel and Frazetta once again joined forces. Krenkel created preliminary roughs for Frazetta's "Dracula V Wolfman" and "Gargoyle" which would be published on the covers of Creepy and Eerie (Warren Publishing.) Krenkel and Frazetta remained colleagues and life-long friends until Krenkel passed away from cancer in 1983.  In an interview conducted shortly after Krenkel’s death, Frazetta remembered his old friend this way: " I thought of Roy as just a wonderful inspiration, a lot of fun, a lot of laughs. Certainly, he made me go. There are a few people that made me go in my career, but he was certainly a major factor. Roy really introduced me to books and showed me art and showed me just how far you could really go. I was awfully casual about it; I just did my thing my way and really didn't make any pretensions of going to high places or anything quite like that. And Roy said: you must do this, Frank. Look at these guys, look at these guys.’ And he'd show me this wonderful art that really got me fired up. Not that I wanted to be like them, but it just amazed me as to the kind of talent that really was out there that I wasn't aware of. Whether they were alive or dead, you know? And it really got me fired, just like it seems I inspire younger artists. These guys inspired the hell out of me, forced me to look! It was great. It was great conversation about the many, many nuances of art. What makes it work, what doesn't make it work, and it was quite an education."

Fantasy fans and Frazetta fans alike, owe a great debt to Roy Krenkel for getting Frazetta involved in painting book covers for Ace Books in the early sixties. Without Roy, Frazetta's career may have gone in another path.

Well, Roy wasn't only a friend, teacher and inspiration to up-and-coming artists like Frazetta. Al Williamson, Michael Kaluta, Jeffrey Catherine Jones and a host of others, he was also a conduit to the works of the masters of old that he himself cherished, collected and emulated -J. Allen St. John, Franklin Booth, Norman Lindsay, Charles Knight, William Walcot. Joseph Clement Coll, and Fortunino Matania being just a few of his favorites. He was particularly enamored with Czechoslovakian artist Zdenek Burian, famous for his atmospheric and evocative Paleo reconstructions.

Compatriot and fellow artist Al Williamson had been receiving the newly published English-language collections of Zdenek Burian's Paleo work which, up until the mid-1950s. were only available in Czechoslovakia, but were then released worldwide by Artia Books in a series of six volumes dating from 1958-1966. Needless to say, Roy went bananas over them and would espouse their merit to any and all, eventually amassing a sizable Burian reference library of his own.

Roy, in turn, turned Frank onto his brand-new-at-the-moment favorite artist. It doesn't take too much of a stretch of the imagination to see that Frank studied and was inspired by the finer aspects of Burian's oil painting technique, combining it with his own fledgling attempts and influences, creating something startlingly bold and fresh in the process.

Frank readily admitted that he held Burian's work in the highest esteem and while he never stated that Burian was THE major influence on his oil painting style, he also didn't deny it. Roy was truly a guiding light, all right. A friend and father figure to so many of the latter 20th-century fantasy illustrators, who in turn, were so enamored of him. So many, in fact, it would be very easy to label him "Father of Heroic Fantasy." and his work should be on his wiki for all to see. Dehumanizer3000 (talk) 02:23, 18 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]