This is the 100th post on the blog. So here’s a cover from ‘Fortune’ magazine. Fortune is, of course, a US financial journal. This issue, from June 1940 comes from an era when much of the world was at war, except the USA, and is linking industry and communication (in the form of aviation) to…
March Roundup
Here’s the roundup from March 2019. As expected, there’s plenty of posters, but… …we also have patches, stamps, envelopes, rugs, ashtrays, badges, book jackets, a logotype, a mural and a marble bas relief! What was your favourite? James Kightly, Vintage Aero Writer.
Clash of Symbolic Eagles
Today’s Poster is an incredibly strong design, the equal in some ways of the ‘Your Country Needs You’ Kitchener / Uncle Sam example, though I’m sure this is far less well known. The poster was created by Charles Livingston Bull, 1874 – 1932, and produced by the Alpha Litho. Co., Inc., N.Y. Taking advantage of…
LeO Variations
I promised to take another look at the LeO 451 Heller kit box art again. A fair number of old kits get several different boxings, this one has at least four. One is a classic ‘all action’ style, most popular in the sixties, where the guns are firing, bombs are dropping and flak bursts going…
Doodle Amelia
One from a special day on Google, a special ‘Google Doodle’ artwork featuring noted aviatrix Amelia Earhart. Here’s she’s seen boarding her Lockheed Vega, preserved in the Smithsonian collection, which incorporates the Google letters as the ‘registration’ and in her scarf. James Kightly, Vintage Aero Writer. Image from Google, screengrab from file.
Lovely LeO
For the 95th post on the blog, we have the box art from the Heller Lioré et Olivier LeO 451 1/72 scale kit. This is one of the newer series of retro kit reissues, here with a retro cover art from an original package as the kit was issued in the 1970s. The artwork’s a…
Soviet Airwomen’s Training
A Soviet poster at the end of Women’s History Month today. A slightly rough translation of this 1931 poster’s strapline would be “Proletarian women! Master aviation equipment, go to school and technical colleges for advancing civil aviation!” The Communist revolution needed to enable such skills and enhance the capability of the population, but here, as…
Which Woman’s Wings?
Women’s History Month is nearly at an end. One oddity, here it looks like a great film, lots of American aircraft*. Except it’s not. The US film poster for the British film ‘They Flew Alone’ released in the US as ‘Wings and the Woman’, directed by Herbert Wilcox and starring his wife Anna Neagle. It’s…
Credible Comet?
These ‘trench art’ ashtrays are relatively common in junk shops and antique shops. This is to a degree because most of them are modern made, and vary enormously between the very convincing, and the dubious rubbish. This represents the pre-war de Havilland DH 88 Comet racer, reasonably convincingly though the casting as usual lacks credibility…
Airship Tension
Two artworks showing the experience of operating airships in the Great War, one from the German side, the other from the British. John Lavery’s, ‘A Convoy, North Sea, 1918’ gives a good feel of the vertiginous experience of being suspended between sea and sky while providing an anti-U-Boat patrol over a merchant ship convoy. While…
A Year of Aviation Illustration & Art 