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…
Category: Books
In Colour! Bombers & Fighters
A pair of books that were passed onto me by my friend Carole Barker, from her father Bernard Thorpe‘s collection. These are based on pre-war information, and were an exciting visual feast, given the paucity of colour printing in the period. On the covers, a pre-war Hawker Hurricane and Vickers Armstrong Wellesley, the Wellesley’s artwork…
French Ivan
A strong cover design for a paperback in French – ‘Poursuite dans l’Atlantique’ (‘Atlantic Pursuit’) by Ivan Southall by éditions Gérard & C°, 1960. The original book is a rarely seen fictional work by Australian Short Sunderland pilot veteran and later author, translated soon after publication into French. English language details here. Somewhat surprising, to…
Metal Fist Thunderbolt
Today the cover of a pilot’s type instructional manual, here the Republic P-47 Thunderbolt. What makes it of interest is the decision to create a remarkable mailed fist background to the profile drawing of the machine. James Kightly, Vintage Aero Writer. Via Matt Savage, Mach One Photography.
Clipper Clobber
From the excellent San Francisco Airport Aviation Museum and Library comes this neat 2013 exhibition catalogue. It serves as an insight to how an assemblage of aviation ephemera and collectables can pull together a good story of a now vanished age, with echoes of some elements of today’s airline experience, but many more differences. The…
Rupert’s Aeroplane Adventure
From a Facebook post come these two photographs of delightful period book illustrations from the Rupert Bear series, Rupert being a much-loved children’s book character in the UK, still going strong from these early adventures starting in the 1920s. Annie Hughes writes: “With thanks to a correspondent following the Ch5 Programme ‘British Airways- 100 Years…
Mind the TREE!
Cranky, ‘homemade’ aircraft are a longtime staple of children’s illustration, but we mustn’t forget they would’ve seemed very different to readers in the early decades of heavier-than air flight in the early Twentieth Century – rather as we would look at homemade Mars Rovers or the like today. Here’s a somewhat eerie illustration by Austrian…
Through the Prop
Something different again, thanks to my friend and colleague Chad Matthew Hill of Django Studios. Books with see-through pages, or pages that overlay onto the next are usually regarded as kids’ stuff, but here we can see a very adult use in explaining the complex mechanism of the Hamilton Standard ‘Hydromatic’ feathering propeller*. Here’s a…
Posters Everywhere
Today’s Posters surprised me! Doing a project like this can start one seeing the subject pop up in all kinds of places, in a ‘seeing patterns’ kind of way, but this just leapt off the screen at me. It’s perhaps worrying that I’m so current in the topic that can point to the origin of…
Modern ‘Colour’
Here’s a few pages from a book from 1931*, when roundels were RED white and blue, thanks to the hand tinting colour process used. We take full colour printing for granted these days, but it wasn’t that long ago it was a big deal to have any colour at all – this book has only…
A Year of Aviation Illustration & Art 