Show Card Writing, Part 1

If you were to walk into any store, pharmacy, or theater lobby 100 years ago, you would be see handmade advertising signs everywhere. These were called "show cards" and they were big business for commercial artists.

Shop window, Waterford, Ireland, 1926

Just as every town had work for a cobbler and a blacksmith, it also had a show card writer, sometimes many. 

Show card writers would tell you that theirs was a different profession from sign painting, engrossing, or calligraphy, with different tools, techniques, and workflow. They called themselves "writers" instead of "letterers" or "sign painters." William Hugh Gordon, one of the masters of this art, said that the lettering "is really written, so called because [it was] produced by the rapid single stroke method, much the same as writing, regardless of whether a brush, pen, or other device is used." 

The golden age of the show card was between about 1890 and 1920. Show card artists employed by the larger stores often had drawing and painting skills to add to the lettering.

Price tags, or "price tickets," as they were called then, were surrounded with border devices, which went in and out of favor. 

Although show cards were were ubiquitous, they were also ephemeral and disposable. Painted on cardboard, few of them survive today.

Happily, there has been a solid revival in show card writing. Upscale cafés and sandwich shops use hand lettering for their menus and specials; boutique grocers like Trader Joe's often have excellent hand lettered signs. Some of the great artistic cultures, such as Ireland, never lost the art. For the rest of us, rediscovering it, hand-made signage is becoming again what it once was: a mark of quality and distinction.  

Tomorrow we'll take a look at the tools and techniques of the show card writer.

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Previously on GurneyJourney:

Read the whole series:
Show Card Writing, Part 1
Show Card Writing, Part 2 

Show Card Writing, Part 3 

Documentary on sign painters

Irish Signs

Hand-Painted Signs (mostly North African).
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There are several Flickr groups devoted to hand painted signage:
“Hand-Painted Signs of the World.”
“Folk Typography”
“Signpaintr,” dedicated to the lost art of hand-lettering
“Hand-Painted Signs of Cambodia.”

Shop window photo from Waterford via Flickr

Book Review: Pterosaurs by Mark Witton

Pterosaurs dominated the skies during the time of the dinosaurs. They were remarkably diverse creatures, from the size of a sparrow to giants as tall as a giraffe, and were by far the largest creatures ever to fly.

One of the tallest subgroups, known as the azhdarchids, stood as tall as giraffes.

Yet surprisingly, the scientific story of pterosaur anatomy, ecology, and extinction has not been told as thoroughly as has that of the dinosaurs.

A new book called Pterosaurs: Natural History, Evolution, Anatomy helps to fill the gap. It is published by Princeton University Press, the same publisher that produced The Unfeathered Bird by Katrina van Grouw.

Mr. Witton is the ideal person to write such a book. He combines his deep knowledge of the subject as a paleontologist at the University of Portsmouth (U.K.) with his skills as an artist, and he has a flair for informal but accurate writing. His 292-page book is the most comprehensive and authoritative book to come along since Peter Wellnhofer's classic Illustrated Encyclopedia of Pterosaurs back in 1991.


The book contains about 200 illustrations, mostly in color. Typically Witton portrays each type in a side-view flying position at the bottom of the flap cylce. In most cases the color restoration is accompanied by a line drawing of the reconstructed skeleton in the same pose. There are also many fossil photographs, maps, diagrams, and full-environment restorations.

Witton's book covers general topics first, such as what we know and don't know about the skeletons, soft tissues, coloration, aerodynamics and behaviors. He then covers more than 130 species group by group, including many recently discovered and beautifully preserved specimens. The back of the book has a very thorough list of references and an index for deeper reading.
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Find out more:
Amazon: Mark Witton's new book Pterosaurs: Natural History, Evolution, Anatomy

Amazon: Peter Wellnhofer's 1991 book Illustrated Encyclopedia of Pterosaurs

Facebook page for the book
Princeton University Press webpage
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North Sentinel Island

One of the inspirations for the fantasy island of Dinotopia is a real place called North Sentinel Island. 

North Sentinel Island (left) and Dinotopia

Hidden away in the Bay of Bengal, east of India, North Sentinel Island is about the same area of Manhattan. The people who live there have remained to the present day almost entirely unstudied by anthropologists, untouched by first world diseases, and unspoiled by tourists. It is the last place on earth undisturbed by modern civilization.

The island has enjoyed this condition for a variety of unusual circumstances. The entire coastline is surrounded by impassable coral reefs. There is no reliable harbor. There's nothing on the island worth claiming by more powerful nations. The view on Google Earth shows solid tree cover and no sign of roads, settlement, or agriculture.

However, there appear to be between 50 and 400 people living there. No one knows for sure how many. They speak a language that no one else understands. They use and cherish fire, but it is believed they don't know how to make it. They haven't developed the paddle, so they can't power their dugouts to the nearby Andaman Islands, and have never developed trade. Two cargo ships, the MV Rusley and MV Primrose grounded on the coast in 1977 and 1981. Most of the crew was rescued, and the inhabitants scavenged iron from the wrecks for arrowheads.

The Sentinelese fiercely rebuff all attempted visits or gifts. If anyone tries to greet them from the outside world, nearly naked warriors appear on the beach and attack with spears and arrows. Despite several attempts to make contact, usually by leaving gifts on the beach, the Indian government has decided to leave them undisturbed, and now arrests anyone who attempts to approach the island.

What stories do they tell each other about the few helicopters that have hovered briefly over their beaches? What have they made from the parts they salvaged from the wrecked ships? What do they know that we have forgotten?
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Wikipedia on North Sentinel Island
Mental Floss: The Stone Age People of North Sentinel Island

Titles on sketchbook covers

Blog reader Juergen van Straelen asked: "I noticed the nice cover decorations of your sketchbooks and I was wondering which paint you use for this. Do you fix the paint to make it more resistant?"

Thanks for asking, Juergen. First off, as a calligrapher and sign painter since I was in high school, I love to paint a title on each sketchbook. While I'm using the book, it helps me find the front, and it helps me remember what's in a book after it's finished. I usually title the book with whatever words I write on the first page.

I have tried a lot of paints and inks for the titles, such as gel pens,  enamel markers  and acrylic paint,  with varying levels of success. Acrylic doesn't stick well to the watercolor sketchbook covers, which seem to be made of some kind of fake leather. Gel pens are OK on paper, but they skip a lot on the covers.  Enamel markers work OK; they're opaque and wear well, but I find they clog up eventually.

What I have found works best is One-Shot sign painters' paint.  This is a very opaque enamel that holds up to incredible abuse. You only need about four colors for all your titles. I use yellow, red, light blue, and white.

If you do hand-lettered titles on your sketchbooks, please email me a photo. I'll choose a few of my favorites to feature on a future blog post.

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Links for: Enamel markers

One-Shot sign painters' paint

gel pens

Watercolor sketchbook

Arrest of a Propagandist

The preliminary studies that led up to Ilya Repin's dramatic painting "Arrest of a Propagandist" show how changes in design can alter the staging and psychology of the story.

This charcoal study shows a young Russian dissident captured by the police. His hands are tied behind his back as the authorities search the house for illegal literature. One suitcase of such contraband lies open, with stuff scattered at his feet. A man at left with a lowered head seems to face him with hard questions. Members of his family or his village stream down the stairs at right. A baby plays at his feet.


This small painted version develops that idea further. He takes away the bearded man's cane and makes him light against the dark background. A little girl clings to her mother's dress near the man. The light shapes and the bright red shirt attract attention to the right places. The composition seems like a "go," in fact Russia used this version as a stamp design.

But like a stage director, Repin keeps trying more variations. In this study, his head turns to stage right to face an official, who sits with his legs crossed in a chair and reads aloud some of the forbidden writing. This is much more dramatic and powerful psychologically. A few sympathetic figures stand at stage left, but we can't really see their emotions, and they become overly important to the picture.

In the final state of the painting, Repin raises the stakes even higher. He removes all the sympathetic figures from the main room and crowds them in the back hallway at right. This deletion makes the accused man seem more isolated, more Christ-like, and his fate seems more dire. The men at the window look conspiratorial and guarded, while a menacing figure, like Judas, sits alone at the rear. One of these men must have been the informer, and the accused seems to be shooting a look their way.

Two men, including a uniformed guard with a weapon, work together to restrain him. The suitcase appears in the immediate foreground, packed with material, with scraps of something torn up on the floor at left. The seated official is an older man with glasses.

Next to him is a young official, perhaps a lawyer, his fingers delicately balanced on the chair back. Above him is an upraised hand with another bundle of captured papers.

In a storytelling picture like this, the designer is a dramatist on a par with a film director. Compositional choices should be driven by mood and meaning, not just as an exercise in abstract shapes or formal niceties.

Pencil and watercolor wash

Here's a drawing I did of dappled summer light on a farmhouse, done in graphite pencil and gray watercolor wash. 

This is a very traditional way to sketch, a tried and true technique. And it's a technique that I would recommend for beginners who want to ease into water media, or anyone who doesn't want to carry a lot of stuff. All you need is a little jar of water, a rag or paper towel, a paintbrush, and a couple of graphite pencils, maybe an HB and a 2B, and an eraser. 

There are many ways to approach pencil and wash, but I like to use the wash for tones up to about a 40% gray where I need flatness of tone, such as a sky or the shadow side of a building. The parts of the building that you leave white really pop this way. 

With the regular graphite pencils, you should be able to add the washes over the pencil without disturbing it, so you can do the pencil drawing first. But I tend to do a light but accurate layin and then add the washes, and when they're dry, I add the darker and softer pencil strokes.

Rendering of a proposed dining room by Otto Eggers from Guptill's book.

As for the surface, drawing (or cartridge) paper tends to buckle if you add anything more than a few light washes. If your washes are large or wet, you might want to use Bristol board or a watercolor sketchbook.

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The best book on pencil drawing is Drawing and Sketching in Pencil by Arthur Guptill. He also did a book called Color in Sketching and Renderingfrom 1935 which goes more into watercolor and wash.

A Few Favorite Podcasts

Blog reader Christina said, "I just started reading Imaginative Realism, and I'm really enjoying it. In the book you say you listen to podcasts. I'm wondering which podcasts you listen to."

Thanks, Christina. Here are five of my favorites. I love all these programs because I can listen while I'm painting without being distracted by visuals. I'll give logo of the program, a description of the program, and an individual show I really liked:

Radiolab. "Radiolab is a show about curiosity. Where sound illuminates ideas, and the boundaries blur between science, philosophy, and human experience."Happy Birthday, Good Dr. Sacks. "One of our favorite human beings turns 80 this week. To celebrate, Robert asks Oliver Sacks to look back on his career, and explain how thousands of worms and a motorbike accident led to a brilliant writing career."

This American Life. "The radio show and TV show follow the same format. There's a theme to each episode, and a variety of stories on that theme. It's mostly true stories of everyday people, though not always." 
"Georgia Rambler." In the 1970s a reporter named Charles Salter wrote a column for the Atlanta Journal called "Georgia Rambler." He'd get into his car, head out to some small town, and ask around until he found a story. This week, nine of us go to Georgia to try it out for ourselves, in small towns all over the state.


Sidebar Nation. "Four-color conversations on comics, art, and pop culture."
Brad Holland. "Brad's been a 'creator of images' (that's a nice safe title) for almost four decades now and he's still going strong. In our opinion, his career and contributions to the art community are marked in several ways."

Science magazine podcast. "The world's leading journal of original scientific research."
Bird Intelligence. As birds earn recognition for their intelligence, scientists are taking a closer look at bird brains using PET scans. Virginia Morell describes the state of the research.

TED talks on audio. A wide variety of interesting presentations on science and art.

If you would like to nominate your favorites in the comments, perhaps I'll do a poll of the best of the best.

Sketchbook Report in IA92

My full 'Sketchbook Report' from the Portrait Society Conference has just been published in the August/ September issue of International Artist magazine. 

The issue also has Matthew Innis's detailed coverage and photos from the same event, plus "The Power of Notan" by Mitchell Albala, and "Foundational Truths" by Roger Dale Brown. 

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Portrait Society of America

International Artist magazine issue 92 coming soon to your newsstand.

Previously: GJ poll results of favorite art magazines 

Drew Struzan documentary

A new documentary film about movie poster artist Drew Struzan will premiere at ComicCon a week from tomorrow. (Video link)

Struzan created many of the legendary poster images from the '70s through the '90s, until photomontage solutions took over. Struzan was and is a master of synthesizing the excitement, glamour, and acting personality of a film in a single image. When you first saw a Struzan poster, it made you want to go watch the film, and then once you experienced the film, the Struzan image lived as the symbol of the film in your mind's eye.

The documentary includes interviews with Stephen Spielberg, George Lucas, Guillermo del Toro, Leonard Maltin and many others. It will release widely to theaters August 16.
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More at Slashfilm 
There are two good art books on Struzan: Drew Struzan: Oeuvre, and The Art of Drew Struzan

Painting a sunset in casein

Last evening I sat beside the Hudson River to paint the sunset.




This short video (link to video) shows how it came together. With such a subject, there's not much need for a preliminary drawing, so I just jump in with the brushes.

The colors I'm using are: Titanium white, cadmium yellow light, raw sienna, cadmium red scarlet, Venetian red, cerulean blue, and ultramarine blue deep.

Video tech notes: I shot the real-time video by mounting the camcorder on a new swing-out camera arm that I have mounted on my homemade pochade easel. The time lapse is shot with a GoPro camera mounted on a wind-up timer that sits on a Lego-powered motion control dolly. I have a second timer set up for tilt shots as well as pans.

Materials:  casein
1/4 inch flat brush 
Moleskine watercolor notebook
Waterman Phileas red fountain pen 
Lots of info on casein at Richeson's FAQ about casein