...In his youth during the 1920s, Finlay discovered the magazines Amazing Stories and Weird Tales, which focused on sci-fi and horror, respectively. Once he reached adulthood in the mid-1930s he felt confident enough in his artistic prowess to try to get a position at those journals. Finlay’s mastery of stippling was so advanced that it nearly cost him a job at Weird Tales because his employers weren’t sure that their printing process could reproduce his fine detail, but it turned out that it could. A key medium of Finlay’s was scratchboard, a method that incorporates a white clay coating covered in black ink—the artist scratches the black ink away with a scribe or knife, and the resultant effect is similar to a wood engraving. The technique is called “working from black to white,” whereas the more usual method of applying dark ink to a white surface is called “working from white to black.” Finlay’s originality and dedication to an impressive effect can be seen in the fact that he would sometimes blend both techniques in a single image, creating isolated areas of black which he would then scratch away to get a specific gray tone or the hatched or stippled effect he desired. [https://artesecontextos.com/2016/08/the-erotic-macabre-art-of-virgil-finlay/]