The last chronological post* of the blog features a very special item, and some of the fascinating complex background to it – the fictional Carreidas 160 supersonic bizjet. We start with an image of the Carreidas 160 in flight, but all is not what it seems, it’s an excellent creation from here. It was first…
Month: December 2019
Sharp Dressed Regiment
Join the RAF Regiment and go into battle in a sharp dressed blue battledress and camouflage helmet… A great RAF recruiting poster found by Simon Harley on Twitter here. The artwork is by Frank Wootton, a doyen of British aviation art, and the aircraft is an RAF Transport Command Bristol Type 175 Britannia. James Kightly,…
Psych Focke Hits Wall
Spotted in Feb 2020 (post backdated to 2019!) by Hayden Bruce in Perth, WA, is this full-on aircraft graffiti. Not immediately obvious is that it’s an adaptation from one of the many box-top artworks from the Revell 1/72 kit 04678 of the Focke-Wulf Fw 200 ‘Condor‘. Impressive effort! Anyone with more info on it, please…
Santa Baby, Santa Bou
Christmas Eve. Lots of Santa Claus-with-aircraft-posts, but this story from the Aviation Geek club here (do click, have a read, come back) is a fascinating story. In the Vietnam War, an American Caribou transport was painted as a Santa reindeer for Christmas: ‘No group of children ever carried off the fantasy so well. A young…
Avro Claus
Here’s Santa Claus using an aircraft rather than the traditional sleigh and reindeer. This has been a common event in aviation around the world in the modern era, with Santa turning up from the skies in a huge range of different types. This is an early example, with Santa using a post Great War Avro…
Soviet Night
Today’s poster is Aeroflot, the Soviet Russian airline’s Christmas promotion. A great, simple design, though the Tupolev Tu 154‘s drawing needs a little work. James Kightly, Vintage Aero Writer. From Vintage Travel Posters here.
Back in Short Trousers
We’ve seen the work of the great American magazine illustrator Leyendecker here and here, so it’s appropriate we feature another great American illustrator, the one and only Norman Rockwell, on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post, on 15 December 1945, after the end of World War Two. Like most of Rockwell’s art, it…
Man & Prop
An aquatint artwork today. Aviation seems to have only made the margins of fine art, like most forms of modern transport. Here’s an example which could almost be in a Renaissance collection. Entitled Propeller, 1934, William Heaslip, Associated American Artists, etching and aquatint on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum (link). Artistically, it’s an interesting composition….
Concorde Lives!
It’s the holiday season, and for those using a particular high street travel agent, they may well walk into the branch under an overlooked reminder of a lost glory of airline travel. The Flight Centre logo still features one of the most unmistakable iconic airliner shapes, that of the Anglo-French Concorde supersonic machine. Remember –…
Negative KLM Shadow
Today’s poster features a generic thirties airliner promoting the airline KLM by notable poster designer Munetsugu Satomi, dated 1933. This version shows the main routes around the border, a design Satomi used in other posters and seen elsewhere in the period. (It also relies on the poster being displayed complete, of course.) Details and some…
A Year of Aviation Illustration & Art 