Today’s Poster. Having been wandering about in the civil nineteen-tens music, let’s flip to after the Second World War, the military, and quite a different noise – the raw ripping sound of a jet fighter* roaring overhead, made real in a poster. A standard response to airbase NIMBYs** is another cliche, promoted by western air…
Month: February 2019
Song in Squantum
Today we have a colour song sheet cover from 1912. Following on from yesterday’s Magnificent Men post, here we have another, in this case real period piece, featuring pre-Great War music, aircraft and art. There’s something rather appealing about the slightly naive figure drawing, and the vague aircraft shapes. But how many airshows can claim…
Magnificent Mag Men
Today’s Poster. And a question! A 1965 aviation film, ‘Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines’ that had huge public popularity then and even today. The cartoon illustrations used on the posters, in the credits and elsewhere in the film, by Ronald Searle also have become a core part of the film’s style, quite rightly….
Onkel Zepp
Today’s Poster. A great cartoon portrait of a man who essentially gave his name to the class of aircraft, the rigid airship: Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin. Here it’s a poster for the ‘Internationale Luftschiffahrt Ausstellung’ (International Airship Exhibition) at Frankfurt am Main in 1909, when the military use of airships was a threat of the…
Roll Up! Houdini Flies!
There’s no ‘art’ in the picture sense for today’s poster, but there’s a lot of art in getting people to turn up for an event that may just not happen. And here we feature the popular nineteenth and early twentieth century block print poster style. So a huge audience-grabbing name, of Harry Houdini (Ehrich Weiss)…
Massed Mercs
A wartime advertisement by Mercedes Benz. What’s interesting, I think is the style and approach is similar to many other advertisements, showing the massed ranks for the company’s vehicles (here the half track and staff cars from the company, and the Heinkel He 111 bombers powered by Daimler Benz engines). However, the knowledge that the…
How’s Your Hudson?
Today’s Poster – variations. This poster ‘The capture of U 570 by a Lockheed “Hudson” of British Coastal Command’ is one of the extensive ‘Back them Up’ series of the Second World War, but was intended for a much wider use than most of the normal propaganda posters of the period, with use as far…
Missing Fabric Man
You never know where the next one will come from*. Today it’s a recreated modern version of an historical quilt, both in an excellent little book by Bill Volckening called ‘Modern Roots – Today’s Quilts from Yesterday’s Inspiration’. Available from your quality bookseller, in our local case that would be Can Do Books, Melbourne, though…
BOAC’s ‘Back’
An airliner in an airline scheme. But not what it seems. Just rolled out is this Boeing 747 of British Airways in the scheme of its predecessor company, the British Overseas Airways Company, BOAC. One of four Jumbos to be painted in the now popular ‘retro’ schemes, this is a newer model of the same…
The Lockheed Header
The current page header image is a painting of a Lockheed Model 12 Electra Junior used on a Lockheed publicity brochure, from my personal collection. James Kightly, Vintage Aero Writer.
A Year of Aviation Illustration & Art 