Reynold Brown (October 18, 1917 – August 24, 1991) was a prolific American realist artist who painted many Hollywood film posters.
He attended Alhambra High School and refined his drawing under his teacher Lester Bonar. A talented artist, Brown met cartoonist Hal Forrest around 1936-37. Forrest hired Brown to ink (uncredited) Forrest’s comic strip Tailspin Tommy.
During World War II he worked as a technical artist at North American Aviation where he met his wife, fellow artist Mary Louise Tejeda.
Following the war, Brown drew numerous advertisements and illustrations for magazines such as Argosy, Popular Science, Saturday Evening Post, Outdoor Life, and Popular Aviation. Brown also drew paperback book covers.
Brown taught at the Art Center College of Design where he met Misha Kallis, then an art director at Universal Pictures. Through Kallis, Brown began his film poster work starting with The World in His Arms (1952), then designed the artwork for dozens of film posters for Universal and AIP, including:
Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954)
Tarantula (1955)
This Island Earth (1955)
Revenge of the Creature (1955)
The Creature Walks Among Us (1956)
Curucu, Beast of the Amazon (1956)
The Deadly Mantis (1957)
The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957)
I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957)
Man of a Thousand Faces (1957)
The Land Unknown (1957)
The Monolith Monsters (1957)
Attack of the 50-Foot Woman (1958)
Attack of the Puppet People (1958)
Monster on the Campus (1958)
Teenagers from Outer Space (1958)
The Atomic Submarine (1959)
Curse of the Undead (1959)
The Time Machine (1960)
The Pit and the Pendulum (1961)
Konga (1961)
The Brain That Wouldn’t Die (released 1962)
Burn Witch, Burn (1962)
Phantom of the Opera (1962)
The Premature Burial (1962)
Black Sabbath (1963)
Black Zoo (1963)
Day of the Triffids (1963)
The Man with X-Ray Eyes (1963)
Godzilla vs. The Thing (1964)
Goliath and the Vampires (released 1964)
Masque of the Red Death (1964)
The Night Walker (1964)
War of the Zombies (1964)
Die Monster, Die (1965)
Planet of the Vampires (1965)
Frankenstein Conquers the World (1966)
Ghost in the Invisible Bikini (1966)
Destroy All Monsters (1968)
Spirits of the Dead (1969)
The Dunwich Horror (1970)
Brown suffered a severe stroke in 1976 that left his left side paralysed and ended his commercial work.
In 1994, Mel Bucklin’s documentary about Reynold Brown entitled The Man Who Drew Bug-Eyed Monsters was broadcast on US public television. A book reproducing many of Brown’s artworks, Reynold Brown: A Life in Pictures, was published in 2009.
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