Howard Scott's Billboard Art

Howard Scott (1902-1983) was the premiere designer of billboard art in mid-twentieth century America. He created campaigns for Esso gasoline, Schlitz beer, Nash automobiles, and Heinz ketchup.

His billboards usually had a clever line with a likable, homespun character against a plain background, not unlike Norman Rockwell's Saturday Evening Post covers, which he admired. 

He went to great lengths to find the simplest composition. His gags had to come across at a glance to people driving by at high speed. "Give them a nimble-witted one-act play," he said, "convincingly characterized with complete realism if you want to stop the crowds on Main Street."

He worked in a neat Manhattan studio overlooking Rockefeller Plaza, and was known as a thorough professional. He chose to paint in gouache because it was more direct and it dried faster, an advantage for tight advertising deadlines. In addition to billboards, he also painted posters and magazine covers.  

In 1939, he said he wasn't threatened by the possibility that photographs might replace illustration on billboards:

"The camera is out. And for good reasons. The camera reproduces the colors of the subject; the artist intensifies them, makes them more brilliant than they are in nature....Another thing. It's practically impossible to get models to act successfully for the camera....The artist can often be more dramatic by taking liberties with drawing. Figures may be shown in actually impossible positions to put over an idea that would stump the accurate camera. Sometimes anatomical distortions —not obvious to the observer—serve to make the action more legible or to give it greater emphasis."

Books: Forty illustrators and how they work
Illustrator in America, 1860-2000

Car Dealership

Thanks to Mark Frauenfelder for sharing this post on BoingBoing

I brought my car to the dealership for a service checkup. The service guy told me it would take about 45 minutes. 

 

He pointed me to a waiting room, which had a coffee machine, some magazines, and a TV set. But I was tired of hearing about Romney and Obama. So I headed onto the sales floor. I found an empty chair next to the snack machine. I laid out my watercolor gear on a desk and got to work.

The hazy daylight streamed in through floor-to-ceiling windows. Clusters of red, white, and blue balloons hung from the ceiling. A sports car sat in the middle of the room, its silver paint mirroring bright highlights from the windows.

The sales people seemed transfixed by their computers. One guy played digital solitaire. They took no notice of me. When I was finished with the painting, I showed it to them. They took photos of it with their cellphones to put on their Facebook pages. 

-----

Related post: Mud Puddle  

Unmade Beds

When John Singer Sargent painted his friend Ambrogio Raffele in a cramped hotel room in the Italian Alps, he titled the picture "His Studio." He also called it "No Nonsense."

Along with the painting-within-a-painting, he featured the unmade bed. Never mind if it looks messy and there's wet oil paint everywhere: the morning light looks gorgeous on the linen sheets and on the white shirt thrown over the edge of the bed.

Sargent was in good company painting unmade beds. Pioneering realists loved to paint unmade beds for the very reason that they were so quotidian and so un-arranged. Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863) painted this bed in watercolor in 1828.

Adolph Menzel drew this bed in 1845, using a stump to soften the folds of the bedclothes. Menzel himself never married, but that didn't stop him from infusing many of his drawings with a sensuous, animated feeling. Without sacrificing naturalism, Menzel's drawing seems almost alive. The pillows appear to be on the verge of waking up themselves, as if they are reaching over and nuzzling the duvet.

Menzel expert Michael Fried accounts for this quality by suggesting that Menzel projected his bodily memories of what it felt like "to rest his own head in the pillows, to to draw the duvet over his reclining body, to fall asleep, to wake, and so on, in combination, of course, with his unique ability to project those feelings back into the drawing taking shape under his hand."

Big collection of Sargent links at Making a Mark 
Book: Menzel's Realism: Art and Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century Berlin
Appreciation of the Sargent painting by Garin Baker

Crescent Wrench Factory

--Thanks to Courtney at Artist Daily for spotlighting my post "Visually Similar" in your latest online forum--

In the summer of 1980, I knocked on the door of the Crescent Wrench Factory in Jamestown, New York to see if I could do a sketch of the machines inside.

The shop manager was reluctant to give permission at first, but eventually agreed as long I wore a hardhat, goggles, and earplugs— and stayed out of the way.

I set up near a machine where a huge mechanical hammer repeatedly crashed down on the forged pieces to trim off the excess margin. As the workpieces were trimmed, they fell down a chute to a bin in the lower right.

I met the operator during one of his breaks, and he explained how the cables of his wrist restrainers were timed to pull his hands out of the way of the hammers.


In 2011, production of Crescent wrenches moved to China.
Crescent company on Wikipedia
Video of how a combination wrench is made


The sketch is drawn with gray markers, charcoal, and pen.
At right is a levels histogram to address the comment by Katherine.

Loomis's Scheme for Tonal Organization

Illustrator Andrew Loomis developed a practical scheme for organizing the tonal values of a picture. 

In his book Creative Illustration  he presents squares of four different tones: white, light gray, dark gray, and black.


If you let one of those tones dominate, you can arrange them four different ways: 1. Grays and black on white, 2. Black, white, and dark gray on light gray, 3. Black, white, light gray on dark gray, and 4. Grays and white on black.



Nearly any sort of picture can fit one of these plans. Loomis proves it by creating a set of thumbnail sketches where the tones are carefully grouped and simplified.

For example, this sketch of kids and sleds on snow fits the second plan. After doing the pencil thumbnail, he creates a small sketch in oil, still keeping to those four tones. "Design is rarely a complete accident," Loomis says. "It has to be balanced, simplified, or stripped to essentials, and usually tried in several ways to arrive at the best one."

These sketches of a mother and a baby near a window follows the third plan. "So many of us attach so much to the material and subject, so little to the design and arrangement of it."

------

Creative Illustration vintage copies on Amazon

(a new republished edition will come out soon). 

Downloadable version from "Escape from Illustration Island."

Changes in Movie Poster Colors

The color schemes of movie posters, on average, tend to emphasize the warm colors (fire! blood! passion!), especially oranges and reds. Blue and cyan are slightly less common, but their popularity has grown in recent years. Magenta and green are relatively rare.

By sampling pixels from movie posters since 1914, Vijay Pandurangan has compiled a bar chart showing how the distribution of basic hues has shifted over the years. He ignored black and white, and also cancelled variations in value and saturation, showing the colors in their purest form.

Can we draw any conclusions about changes in the zeitgeist? Here's one suggestion: there seems to be a slight increase in cool colors after the end of major U.S. wars. Notice how the blue spikes for a year or two following 1918, 1945, and 1975.
------
Vijay's Blog
via BoingBoing

The Lost Chick

There was another little drama in the barn last week.

A white hen had a clutch of new chicks. The morning after they hatched, one of the chicks, who we named Marco Polo, fell out of the nest. He couldn't climb back in, so he got separated from the others and squeaked shrilly. I found Marco cowering alone in the corner of the barn, looking like he was going to collapse. 

I picked him up and put him back in the nest. The hen accepted him immediately. When I visited the barn the next morning, the hen and all her chicks were out of the nest, including Marco Polo exploring out front. I sketched them in watercolor as they rested. 

Edgar Payne Exhibition

An exhibition of landscape painter Edgar Payne will be on view in Pasadena, California through October 14.
Pasadena Museum of Art / Edgar Payne
Thanks, Steve

Dodging Bullets

William Simpson (1823-1899) was a Scottish artist in south Asia in the 19th century.

This watercolor painting shows a vintage tiger hunt as the Prince of Wales beats the jungle with Sir Jung Bahadoor in the Nepal Terai.

Simpson was an eyewitness to many momentous events, and several times found himself under fire. One time at Balaclava he kept sketching while being shelled. He had a strategy for dodging bullets. "If a shell is coming to you," he said, "it becomes instantly visible as a black speck against the white smoke of the gun which fired it, and before it reaches you, there is plenty of time to go under cover."

Image from Circus No Spin
Book: Visions of India: The Sketchbooks of William Simpson, 1859-62