Book Illustrations

Lately, the archive has at times felt very slow to me. I built the database in the winter and now I am filling and cleaning it and Thursday I masochistically decided that the 25th of February should no longer come before the 3rd of February in my chronological sort. This decision inevitably made the database better but meant that I had to manually go through over 2,000 records. Let’s forget about headache Thursday and go back to Tuesday and also forward to Saturday (I have heard that time might not be as linear as we think). These days I finally did some work with the media database. The task was nothing special, I was entering images and their information into the database, it was what I was working with that made it so interesting. I spent a total of 6 or so hours on Tuesday clicking the same buttons and hitting the same keys and yet my interest was held the whole time.
This is only one testament to how lovely the illustrations were. I was working with book illustrations from the early 1900’s that were some of the most beautiful I have ever seen. Steve and ASIFA-Hollywood have kindly let me post some of them on my blog so that I could better describe to you how I felt about them. It was incredibly difficult to choose but I limited myself to only a few. . . which really means I will have to post more up at a later date.
I will start with these. These are 1912 illustrations from Bland tomtar och troll 6 (Among Elves and Trolls) by John Bauer. Bauer was a Swedish artist known for his fairytale illustrations. This following one struck me first because of its composition. Bauer allows the sky to fill a majority of this picture with just two small elements, a bush and a man on a horse, at the bottom to balance it. This allows the sky to have full the grandeur that the gorgeous colors give it. The colors. While I don’t want to make a blanket statement about any of the illustrations I am going to show you, I have to admit that it always comes back to the colors for me in these. I am horrible at coloring, even with crayons on a placemat my sister always exceeded me and went places I could not easily follow. I think this is why I am so fascinated by these artists' use of colors that, at times, can be so subtle and yet so striking at the same time. Lastly in this illustration I notice the regal horse with his distressed rider. The juxtaposition of the nature of the horse and the human accentuates the rider’s pain just as the beauty of night sky also serves to enhance it. Sorry if I talked too much about it, but look for yourself:



This next one is also a Bauer illustration and I really wanted to show it to you to point out how brown the whole background is while still being so interesting. I think Steve gets a lot a crap from certain people about the fact that the archive spends its time on book illustrations, comics, static art instead of just focusing on animation. I think animators could learn a lot from this art. I have found in certain recent animation that people love their backgrounds to be colorful and eye-catching. I don’t think that should be a focus, the animation should be the focus. But this doesn’t mean that the backgrounds should be lackluster. Animators only need to look at this illustration to know that. I also want to show you this illustration to point out that while it is obvious that the troll is far from “pretty” there is an undeniable appeal to it. Sadly, I don’t think the people at Dreamworks saw this illustration before they made Shrek. Well, that movie’s loss.



Okay I could show you more Bauer illustrations but I will restrain myself and show you now two illustrations by Charles Robinson from Our Sentimental Garden and then The Secret Garden. These are kind of Art Deco and are obviously from around the time when advertising art hit its stride. Notice the vibrant colors as well as the contrasting shadow.



There are less colors in this one, obviously, but just as gorgeous.



Okay, I love that those of you who have reached this part have actually read this whole post, because this is getting long. I think I will stop now and continue with more illustrations another day because I want to be able to talk about them without losing my audience.
Wait! No, I will show you one more that I don’t think I needs too much of an explanation of how great it is. It is a Peter Pan illustration by Mabel Lucie Attwell and maybe I just love it because it is so sweet. I don’t think I need to justify why I like this one.



Thank you!