Tag: Art Deco

Art: Fairey Fulmar taking off

Now that I’ve started doing pieces of Art Deco, I naturally and happily venture into propaganda poster art!

This is a Fairey Fulmar taking off from an armored flight deck (apparently a feature of British carriers) during World War II.

My kid liked it, so I put it in large frame and it now hangs on his wall.

Mixing blue and white gouache paint in a ceramic pan with a toothpick

Mixing blue and white. This is going to be the main colour.

Mixing black and white gouache paint in a ceramic pan

Mixing black and white. Grey is going to be the colour of the visual components.

Overview of the finished 21x15 cm painting on a cutting mat next to the ceramic pans of the mixes I used: grey, white and blue.

I painted this on the back of a cereal cardboard box (21×15 cm).

I love how it turned out!

The finished 21x15 cm painting, signed and dated, glued to a back sheet and put in a large frame with a white mounting card.
The finished 21×15 cm painting, signed and dated, glued to a back sheet and put in a large frame with a white mounting card.

Art: Art Deco ad for Herkules Bier (step by step)

I’m experimenting with two things: Art Deco which is a style I absolutely LOVE, and acrylic paint markers. The opaque and consistent colours they achieve lend themselves very well to this type of highly contrasted art.

This is after an Art Deco ad for Herkules Bier from the 1930s.

Masking tape on a small pad of watercolour sheets (the size of a large postcard), pencil sketch of a muscular man flexing his biceps. My mechanical pencil and rubber are on the cutting mat next to the drawing.

Pencil sketch.

I started painted the head, neck, shoulder and part of the left arm. The markers I used are on the cutting board: black, bright orange, pale orange, pink-orange and pale yellow.

It’s a very zen thing to apply patches of colours in various spots and try to achieve gradients. So far so good.

All colours and shadows are done, with the same markers.

Finished! I used only four shades of yellow to orange, and black. All I need to do now is apply a pale blue layer as background.

I fixed several proportion problems that became obvious the next day 🙃

One shoulder was visibly smaller than the other, the neck was not in the center and the waistline was too thin (it is notable that in the reference image, the waistline was too thin and the neck wasn’t exactly centered either.) Here is the fixed version which I framed:

Finished version with a light blue background, which I signed and dated, and framed in black wood.

I was researching this particular ad to learn more about its history and who created it but I didn’t find a lot of hits. However I found a comical review someone wrote about it in an Art Deco book that features this image:

“On page 89 is an ad for Herkules Bier “aus dem Hasenbrau-Augsburg.” The sinister, leviathanic, muscle-bound, fist-clenched figure uses one of the hallmarks of Art Deco—deep shadow to enhance contrast—to convey a message as self-contradictory as it is threatening: Drink this and it won’t go to your belly, it will build the muscle of Germany. Rage is power, and watch out you fops of Versailles.”