Finlay's chosen medium was initially scratchboard which - after first coating with black ink - he would then use a scribe to scratch out a thin white line. He also became adept at stippling, tirelessly creating images made up of thousands of carefully placed ink dots. He used an ultra-fine lithographic dip pen to produce a single dot, a process he repeated endlessly in order to create images of near photographic quality.
In 1927 Finlay discovered SF and horror through the pages of pulp magazines Amazing Stories and Weird Tales. Deciding that he could provide better illustrations he sent six pieces to Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright, who agreed to run four of them in the issue dated December 1935.
The result proved to be an overnight success with both the readers and contributors, who were full of praise for Finlay's work. One famous contributor stunned by Finlay's penmanship was legendary American horror writer Howard Philips Lovecraft, who wrote encouragingly to the young artist, and even composed a poem dedicated to his art :
"Yet here upon a page a frightened glance/Finds monstrous forms no human eye should see;/Hints of those blasphemies whose countenance/Spreads death and madness through infinity"
When Lovecraft died in 1937, Finlay contributed a portrait of the author for the Amateur Correspondent, depicting HP dressed as a bewigged English gentleman, while behind him swarmed the horrors of his fertile imagination. Two years later, August Derleth and Donald Wanderei collected together his best stories for a memorial volume which was titled The Outsider And Others and approached Finlay to design the jacket, a montage of Lovecraftian monsters which has since become an integral part of this now rare volume.
Virgil Finlay died of lung cancer on 18 January 1971, at the age of 56, but the vast portfolio of strange and beautiful work he left behind continues to dazzle all who choose to gaze in wonder at it.
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