Today’s poster is one of an important genre, the war pilot instructional type. A German Messerschmitt Bf 109 pilot attacking a well advised American Republic P-47 Thunderbolt. Clear, blunt advice, including a pixie on a cloud. Memorable? They certainly hoped so. James Kightly, Vintage Aero Writer. Internet find.
Category: Ephemera
Gascogne, Air France
Here’s another inter-war airline timetable, this one of Air France, thanks to Phil Vabre, who mentions that these used to included in Shell Aviation News in the 1930s. Again, it’s a notable piece of commercial art, with a lot of interesting detail. (The signature lower left seems to be ‘Vinci’.) On the unfortunate side, the…
Bay Window
Today’s artwork is an evidently quick drawing from his sketchbook by Australian official war artist Eric Thake aboard a Consolidated Catalina, depicting a crewman on lookout in the portside gun blister. I was looking for other Thake artworks*, but this one jumped out at me as an exceptional work as a sketch. In a National…
Flight Food
Aviation gets used in advertising in many – some surprising – ways. Food advertising can include logical connections, but in the earlier days of aviation, when it was new and exciting, aviation was sometimes used where no connection existed. The idea of selling oats through an aircraft link seems odd today, but was clearly an…
Wing’d Frame
Today’s illustration is a nicely designed foldout timetable. This is the Imperial Airways winter timetable for 1931-1932 and shows the iconic Handley Page HP-42 airliner as used on the then long range routes to Africa, India and the Middle East. The unnamed artist has pulled off a very neat, simple-seeming yet complex design, using the…
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…
Bomber Blackened Sky
A remarkable print today, thanks to regular correspondent Gregory Alegi. A very evocative, dark (literally and figuratively) image of Caproni Ca.3 trimotor bombers approaching an industrial centre. So dense are they they’ve achieved the cliche of ‘turning the sky black’. Initially, due to the use of the black block I thought it was a woodcut,…
Orange Spit
A modern California fruit shipping box today! Aircraft are regularly used as a marketing differentiator, even where there’s no aviation connection. Here’s is a box for California mandarins, ‘Air One’ (Registered Trademark) brand, which has a monoplane fighter on the box – the five blade prop and curves in the fuselage and wings sort of…
Back To The Old Drawing Board
It’s exactly the middle of the year, so today we have one of the items that inspired the idea for the blog. There’s several stories, so settle in… “Well, Back To The Old Drawing Board” by Peter Arno, first published in the March 1, 1941 issue of New Yorker magazine. It’s a remarkable cartoon, and…
Dutch Diana
A fascinating story here. Decorative art on aircraft (usually called ‘nose art’, though for obvious reasons not quite appropriate here) is nothing unusual, but the story behind this, current scheme is, I think, unique. Plenty of art has been copied, or created for a unit by all sorts of people from unit personnel to Disney…
A Year of Aviation Illustration & Art 