Vintage Illustration

The other day I encouraged the girls to go on a treasure hunt in the attic of our new old house. On second thought, that could be a dangerous prospect. I hope the former owners didn't keep a stash of antique porn up there.
Thankfully they've only found a few really old moth eaten clothes and books and papers. This time they came back with a stack of five Ladies Home Journals from 1932 and 1933. Except for the two on the top, they're in good condition.
Reading through them is like going back in time. It is interesting to see that what was important to Americans 75 years ago is pretty much the same today. Many of the ads are about staying young and attractive, feeding your family on a budget, and keeping your children healthy. The messages in Rachel Ray's magazine are the same today, just with different products and claims.
What was amazing was the sheer number of beautiful illustrations in each issue. Today when we think of illustration of this period, we think of the superstars like Rockwell, Lagatta, and Lyondecker. Each LHJ was packed with editorial illustration, spot illustration, fashion illustration and of course, advertising illustration. There were more illos than there were photos. Some of them were so beautifully composed that I wondered if the original may be hanging in a museum some where. I think about these pictures and what was going on in fine art world at the time and I know where I'd have wanted to have been.
Oh, who am I kidding? If I were alive in the 30's, I'd probably live in a shack with 17 kids and a husband who likes my biscuits.
OK, I know this is a photo and NOT illustration, but I liked the ad... too funny.

This little spot illustrations gave no artist credit. I found them interesting because this style looks about 25 years ahead of it's time. I have dozens of cookbooks from the 50's that use this flat two color style.

Someone got to paint a delicious lemon layer cake. I have a lot of old cookbooks from the 20's and 30's that used illustrations instead of photos. I wonder why they didn't take photos for these purposes?
The handling of watercolor is superb in this picture. Me loves everything about it! Maybe I will get the chance to imitate this style sometime... no wait, pay HOMAGE to this style, LOL.

The next three pictures were credited to The Billmeyers. I am guessing this may have been a husband and wife illustrating team. I am going to Wiki them and see what I can find out. More on them later.

I love this decorative composition. I had to be inspired at least a little bit by Alphonse Mucha.


Henry Raliegh... love the paint handling here too. I would love to see the original version of this up close. Maybe I could steal some secrets.


Here are two John Lagattas... I bet he was just cranking 'em out and cashing the checks back in the day. Still, they are beautifully done and simply elegant. I am going to show them to the girls as examples of what can be done with charcoal or graphite washes. They need to think about something other than anime.

I wish these were in better shape.



Perfect Biscuits... don't they have surgery for that nowadays?
Oh well, I had better stop goofing off and get back to the cookbook project.

Painting Food for a change...

I've spent the first several days of this week painting spot illos of food. It is a challenge to make the food look tasty. One bad color choice or badly drawn section can make the picture go from appetizing to disgusting.
It is a lot of fun though. I am experimenting with a looser, more colorful style.
The cookbook cover is next. It is a wrap around with a 1.5" spine. It is all due on Monday.
Why do I want to eat carrot cake right now?

Hartford MFA

I am back from the first two weeks of the University of Hartford's Hartford Art School low residency MFA program. I am majoring in Illustration. Hartford graciously accepted all of the credits from my Syracuse MA, so if I work hard, I can complete the MFA in only a year.
I have four papers, a business plan and a painting due by October. I will blog about these as I get them accomplished.
Here are a few shots of the last two weeks that came from my friend's facebook pages. I hope they don't mind me borrowing them...

More on the statue...

These posts really aren't in order, are they?
I thought I'd post a few shots of the statue in progress. What's interesting about these is what's going on in the background. It looks like beautiful countryside there, though the conditions seem primitive.
One thing that I find interesting is that the sculptor begins the work with the chunk of marble lying on a pile of rubble. I envisioned a studio with the marble upright on a stand, indoors with lighting. I also wonder what would happen if he cut away too much too soon. The expensive piece of marble would be lost. I guess that's why I am not a sculptor, LOL.
Apparently they had to send some of the craftsmen home due to the economy. The broker seemed very grateful for Rob's job. BTW, if you need something carved out of a chunk of marble, give these guys a call and keep a little town somewhere in China in business.

Bringing a picture to three dimensions.

My friend Rob came across a beautiful painting of the Virgin Mary holding the infant Jesus. The painting is over one hundred years old and I hope it's in the public domain. Rob really wanted a beautiful statue of Mary and Jesus to grace the front of his new medical office.
One thing we discovered is that there are some really talented Chinese sculptors overseas. There are a few towns in China who for centuries have mastered the art and craft of marble sculpture. It is an honored profession handed down from generation to generation. About thirty years ago, these craftsmen discovered that there is a huge market in the west for Italian-style sculpture. They moved from carving Asian-themed motifs to creating sculptures of Greek and Roman gods and goddesses and Christian themes. I don't think they have a clue as to the meanings of what they're carving.
Rob looked online at all of the sample statues they had of Mary and Jesus. In many of them, Jesus looked sort of disturbing- he had a large Roman nose (which is fine for a large Roman, but not an infant) and Mary often looked very stylized and heavy. Rob showed me a beautiful painting of Mary with Jesus. In it, Mary is natural and beautiful, she is wearing flowing robes that look like they're being buffeted by the wind, and most importantly, Jesus looks like an adorable, chubby infant.
Rob wondered if I knew what would be involved in capturing this scene in marble. My first thought was to recreate the scene and photograph it from several angles with detail shots and full length poses. We'd need models, a stand, lighting and costumes. The entire thing seemed like a huge undertaking. Rob said he'd call the broker and ask what they needed to recreate this pose.
The broker's answer was simple. "Sure, we can do it, email us the picture."
The picture was a fairly low-rez image from a magazine cover. I was pretty skeptical. I felt a lot better when Rob decided to go with a clay prototype before they started carving from a chunk of marble.
The first few pictures of the work in progress were sent in April. They were off to a good start, but Mary looked a bit heavy and stiff and unnatural. Baby Jesus looked like a disturbing adult/infant with a largish nose and strong brow. The sculptors also had difficulty with the idea of a chubby baby- it made me wonder if chubbiness is a western thing.
The other issue was Mary's hands. They looked like someone filled latex gloves with water and stuck them on her. They had no tendons or knuckles. I went so far as to photograph one of my daughter's friends who has the lovely long fingers we were looking for. I included a shot from that day. She was holding a stuffed rabbit, since we don't have a baby that is the size we need. I was a bit concerned though that the sculptors would take this too literally and change Jesus into a stuffed bunny. I was careful to edit out most of the rabbit.
It took weeks of photoshopping the photos and trying to break through the language barrier to explain to the Chinese artist what we were looking for. What amazed me was how well they did with a very non-descriptive picture, how enthusiastic they were (it showed in their work) and how happy they were to try to please us even after several rounds of revisions.
Someone from the workshop actually flew to Italy and handpicked the chunk of marble to be used in the statue. It arrived to them in June. They worked on it all month and I believe it should be crated and shipped here at some point this summer. She weighs over 1,000 pounds and will require a contractor to install her. One thing about Rob, when he decides to do something, he goes all out.
You should see the ice rink he builds in his backyard every winter.

Beautiful Baby Exhibition

Back in 2006, I was invited to create an illustration for a traveling exhibit sponsored by the Society of Illustrators. The theme is You must have been a Beautiful Baby. Fifty illustrators were asked to create a piece of artwork that depicted them at some point before their 12th birthday.
I chose a version of my nine-year-old self and painted a picture of me looking through the Bionic eye of my Col. Steve Austin doll.
The show is still on the move. It is about to make an appearance in Plainview Texas this fall.
I dug out the artist's statement. It is below.

The Bionic Illustrator?

You may remember an action show from the seventies called The Six Million Dollar Man. It starred Lee Majors as Colonel Steve Austin, an astronaut who was badly injured in an airplane crash. They rebuilt his battered body with bionic parts, which gave him super-human strength. Each episode would feature him getting caught up in some crime-solving melee’, culminating in him moving on to another town, so his identity wouldn’t be discovered.
As a kid, I dreamed of being Mrs. Colonel Austin. But Steve was the same as every good super hero. He could never be in a committed relationship.
The show spawned an action figure of Steve that had a futuristic bionic arm. That arm, of course, was the first thing to get broken off. The Steve doll also had a hole in the back of its head. This allowed you to look in and see what the Bionic Man might be viewing through his incredible Bionic eye. This feature required the doll to have an empty eye socket on his face. As a child, I thought this was really cool. As an adult, I find this disturbing.
When I fast-forward to present day, I realize that things turned out pretty well for me. Ok, I don’t have a Bionic husband who can leap 16-foot chain-link fences or witness a crime in progress half a mile away. But all in all, he’s a pretty good guy. Heck, he let me keep all of my old toys.


Media: Watercolor on Paper

The miracle of loaves and sharks...

I am doing the cookbook cover for our church. It should be out before Christmas and will be a lovely holiday gift. Mary Oxenrider is going to share all of her secret recipes that we've come to love over the years.
Anyway, I am doing the cover. The black and white picture is the sketch we've decided upon. I sketched it from my imagination which is what I typically do.
The challenging part is recreating my sketch into real life. I do that, photograph it, and paint from the photograph.
Sometimes real life looks nothing like I imagined. This was one of those times when I got it pretty close.
On Monday, I drove all over town looking for goblets, the right bread, a table cloth, and wheat. The theme is loaves and fishes. I really didn't want to use real fish- they're expensive, smell bad, and I'd probably have to throw them out after an hour under the hot lights.
Then it hit me. Juliet's Beanie Baby sharks. "Crunch" was her very very favoritist toy ever. One time, she lost it. She cried for days. That was at the height of the Beanie Baby fad, and unfortunately, Crunch was a rare, discontinued toy. Ralph's mother had some connections in PA. She was able to obtain two Crunches which she sent out very quickly. We tucked one away in case of another loss, and we told Juliet that we found Crunch and that somehow he was clean again and had a new tag.
Soon after that, she found the original Crunch. She had put him in a dresser that I was refinishing at the time.
We then gave her the other Crunch and that's how she got three little shark bean bags that are remarkably the same size as Mackerels.
Any port in a storm, right?
BTW, Juliet is a really cool teen these days. She'd probably hate me for revealing this, but she still keeps her three little sharks on a shelf in her room. AWWWWWW!