Friday, August 5, 2016

High Striker

I have only my pencils with me, so I can't capture the noise, the motion, or the color of the midway at the county fair.


I look instead for the bones of the scene—the canopy with its fiberglass decorations, and the fanciful lettering that says ROLLER MAGIC and TICKETS and PLAY LAND.

On the far left is a High Striker game waiting for a strongman with a mallet. The carnival worker taunts, "Which of you boys are real men?" A Popular Mechanics article in 1935 showed how these games were sometimes fixed by controlling the tension of the wire leading up to the bell.

3 comments:

Rich said...

A single pencil at hand? Surely sufficed for a draftsman like yours truly to achieve a convincing result like this one here. Besides, your typographical expertise shows as well, rendering and bringing home the multiple signs and letterings encountered at a parish fair;-)

"...so I can't capture the noise, the motion, or the color of the midway at the county fair", you write;...
with a few speed lines and some blurring you would have added the motion, I guess, no problem for you; neither the color - you would have easily captured it with your gouache-set at hand.

But the noise?

Fabio said...

Another great sketch :)
I'm curious, I don't recall if you mentioned it already James, did you do specific calligraphy exercises (like those long, boring pages of a single letter) or just went ahead and tried getting it as close as possible when copying texts from life?

Bug said...

James, this sketch is one of the reasons I check your posts every day. It's marvelous. Thank you.