Inspired by a discussion on Twitter, here’s a selection of aircraft cutaway artwork, mainly from the British children’s magazine ‘Eagle’ most famous for the cartoon strip ‘Dan Dare’. [It was the era of the straight leading edge Avro Vulcan B1, and the carrier HMS Eagle.] Dare aside, the other highlight for most in the magazine…
Tag: Technology
Thake’s Shapes
Eric Thake (see a brief earlier post here) was an Australian official war artist working with the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) in the latter part of the Pacific War. Unlike many other war artists, he chose to make a significant proportion of his formal, main output as depictions of aircraft wreckage. Almost uniquely, Thake…
Rising Wind
Today a still from Hano Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises film. Loosely based on the biography of the designer of the Mitsubishi ‘Zero’ fighter, it’s an aeronautical design fest, even if very free with real history and some design. Other aspects are bang on, and some, such as the Caproni dream relationship feature often forgotten aircraft…
Fighting Fuel
Today’s Poster, an unusual topic for the blog so far, though a common war theme, featuring an exhortation to conserve fuel for the war effort. But here it’s the Nazi German war effort: ‘Spare Gas für die Rüstung’ : ‘Save Gas for Weapons’ by Willy Petzold (1885-1978). The composition is interesting, the domestic gas ring…
Posters of Interesting Times
Today’s Posters are a set of Chinese aviation instructional posters, an to western eyes, a very different mix of style, content and approach to anything we’ve seen here before. This one below of ‘Active Air Defences’, with the Smithsonian’s source detail here. Is it meant as a ‘how to behave?’, or ‘how you are being…
Special KLM Bag
It appears this carry on is no ordinary one, but comes with a particular piece of equipment. Now, I’d have been guessing all day before I got is, so I’ll just reveal all to the left. It’s an iron. I can understand an iron being useful, and as we know they’re a staple in most…
Lysander’s Bones
Today’s Poster is a very rare one. Not because of the topic, which strangely enough inspired multiple posters, but because of the subject aircraft. The Westland Lysander has appeared in a number of adverts promoting its role, but not often as just a backdrop to another topic. The text reads: “Salvage Bones to make Glycerine…
Cross Lightning
A painting by the remarkable Roy Cross (later well known for his Airfix kit box art) of the English Electric P-1B, later developed into the Lightning fighter, and advertising the Rolls Royce Avon engine. (Linguistically the text is also an example of words concatenating over time. Then ‘turbo jet’, now ‘turbojet’.) Used as a magazine…
39 Model
Today’s Poster, a ‘special’ version from the 1939 New York World’s Fair. You may be surprised… It’s from a rather well known and popular film in the aviation niche, ‘The Rocketeer’. It makes a kind of sense from the film, but you really need to see the film to get it – go on, it’s…
Turning 16
Well, let’s have another poster – there’s so many, after all! But this one’s somewhat different, unless you, the reader, know otherwise? Generally an illustrated aircraft sales pitch features the aircraft itself, rather than a demonstration of this kind of performance element. But creatively done, it makes the curl into a question mark that the…
A Year of Aviation Illustration & Art 