I hope I'm not spamming here, but if y'all really like traditional old-school manual art, I might suggest you look for 'Illustration Magazine' at your local bookstore...I have most issues and each is a well produced tome showcasing many long-forgotten great commercial artists (remember that term Jeff ?!?). I also have included a link to the digital version of this month's issue to wet your whistle...so to speak. Look for it, buy it, you'll love it... http://www.illustration-magazine.com/index.html http://issuu.com/illomag/docs/ill33 http://www.illustration-magazine.com/GALLERY/gallery.html
Ouchy! I remember a fellow production art guy dropped his knife at his table and went to pull his hand back and somehow stuck the bouncing knife into the back of his hand....aye!! I always surmised the 16s were a better choice for me as they had more caster (like a dragster versus a passenger car) and as such turned around corners more predictably and less twitchy than the long 11s. What a nerd! Oh, and the smell of stat processing chemicals....eeeeeyuch. I remember being the guy who was asked to recreate areas of splotchy dot patterns with a knife and a tech pen. Archaic for sure!
I don't know how I missed this one... My first real graphic design job was on the cusp of paste-up and computers. If I close my eyes, I can still smell the warm cloying notes of the wax machine once it had warmed up. I have my fair share of xacto knife scars too. Now years later I have somehow found myself in charge of the ad design department of the local newspaper and what we do now is so far removed from art - there just is no soul. I have "kids" fresh out of school working for me who have no idea what it used to be like and even I was only fortunate enough to get a small taste of how it used to be done. There is a dumb waiter between our office floor and that of advertising sales one floor above where ads have gone up and down for revisions for over 70 years since they moved to the "new" building. Shortly after I started working there an ad fell out of the box and fell into the bottom of the little elevator shaft. Having long arms I was able to stretch down into the dusty dark and retrieve the ad, but I also happened upon another little prize. I unearthed a lead and pot metal ingot covered in dust and grease that had clearly been down the bottom of the elevator shaft for decades. I cleaned it up and decided to make a paper weight out of it. One day, the senior member of our IT department came by and stopped in his tracks and picked up the ingot and just stared at it with a small smile. He sat down and told me how he hadn't seen one in 20 years and asked me where I had found it. Long before we had any computers he worked as a typesetter in that same room and described how the it had been arranged and how each night they would melt down old and worn out copy in a small blast furnace and after scraping off the slag, they'd pour the molten metal into those little ingot molds, ready to be melted down the next day to make new letter sets and the like. He told me to take good care of it and it sat on my desk and reminded me of how much we've gained as designers, but also how much we've lost. We don't get our hands dirty anymore and have so little mental or emotional investment in what we create, and if you know what to look for, it really shows. Last month that gentleman retired. We had a big ol' party and roast and you could tell he was going to miss the paper. I took my turn to tease him mercilessly but at the end when I shook his hand, I pulled that ingot out of my pocket and handed it to him. He accepted it with a smile and a nod. No one else in the room knew what it was anymore except him and me. Times really have changed.
Wow, Chadillac, great find! Thanks for sharing these. I started my career doing paste up, though have to admit, was never very good at it. These are amazing, it is always refreshing to see how an artist works. Sadly this type of art typically ended up, in the trash. Really glad to see it survive. Guess I'll go and find my Benzine can and relive the memories.
Ps, if you don't have scars from 11s or 16s you weren't really there. Most of my fingers had flat points from being sliced off. I do regret not stealing an old waxed from one of my past gigs. I'm sure it ended up in a bin. The best thing about those, were you could comp something up and really look at it, change it, and it was so tactile. We did that, and THEN would translate it into the computer. It was very freeing. I also remember hand building stretcher bars... But that is for another time.
Ditto for me. I was in design school when everything was shifting. We spent the morning "inking" with rapidographs and cutting lith or Pantone paper. We learned all the ins and outs of a monster PMT camera. Then we spent the afternoon in a lab with Photoshop and Quark. The professors would contradict each other constantly depending on their age. I'm so glad I got the opportunity to get a glimpse of it because a couple of years later it was gone...along with a lot of traditional instructors
Mine is my left index finger... Just sprayed down the glass and was wiping with a paper towel in a counter-clockwise motion... it was still in the handle ripped and inch long hunk of fatty gunk out and I have a really screwed up fingerprint over 25 years later. Small wholesale craft supply co... I was product photographer, stripper and typesetter... or as they called it "Graphic Artist"... started at minimum wage, and they taught me everything. I'd typeset on an old linotronic typesetter (16 character LED display), process the little strips, paste up the galleys.... leaving room for pictures. I'd shoot the pages down 33.3% in the stat camera, lay a sheet of ruby on top, and cut out windows for the photographs... We had a 4x5 view camera and I'd shoot 2-1/4" and 4'x5" slide film and use the ruby on the back glass of the camera to lay out the shots. When the flm came back from processing, I'd match up the pictures, carefully cut the film and tape it to the ruby... then we'd send the ruby to scanned and separated at 300%, having them drop out the ruby. The pages would be put together and shipped to the printer... We did supplements to the catalog in 2 color, red and black, on our in-house AB Dick 4860 with a second color head... I'd typset it, shoot the products, process the B&W film, make prints, make halftones, strip it and make negatives, burn the plates... Sometimes the pressman would call in stoned, and I had to run the press too.... And then we had to collate it and stuff it in envelopes for 4500-5000 customers... Those were the days. Then in '86, we got a DX386, a copy of Aldus Pagemaker and a ($5000.00) Texas instruments laser printer.... HOLY SHIT!!!
Same here Kevin & Chad-I graduated Art Center in 1998...when I started school, all renderings were done by hand, marker on vellum and various other manual techniques. By the time I graduated, we were doing most of our final renderings in PShop. The funny thing was that most of the long-serving or older Industrial Design teachers did not use computers at all, but the part-time teachers who taught one day a week and had day-jobs with the west coast automotive studios did use Pshop, Alias etc on a daily basis and were using Pshop in ways that were not covered in any manual so to get 'ahead' a lot of us would take night classes from the Graphic Design Dept as the Graphic Design students were way ahead of us Industrial Design students with their utilization of computer-based drawing tools. It may seem hard to believe today, but the idea of using the computer IN the classroom was nearly unheard of except for in the basement computer labs. Back then, students spent a fortune on prints as color printers were expensive and large format color prints had to be done off-campus...I seem to remember one graduating student spent >$1200 on just three "24 X 36" full-color prints of his renderings. Today, thanks to Moore's Law and such, the costs of computers and printers for students are so much less expensive than they were when I graduated, especially relative to inflation and what you get for your money in terms of technology per dollar. As much as I wish I had received more computer-based training while in school, I still see myself as fortunate to have been in school during this transitional period and it's fun sometimes to show the young guns how to kick it old school...
Aaah good times. They finally put a computer lab into Syracuse in '90 that was only open during the day until 9. We would get done with work at the newspaper, pasteup, Linotype and an industrial upright stat camera, and try to make the lab hours. Us hoodlums finally had to resort to breaking and entering to get any lab time and keep up with the rest of the class. They finally expanded lab hours to 24 hours after we left, all the good that did. But, you look back at that bridging time with nostalgia and the amout of learning that we got was just great. I loved learning paste up, even with the knife cuts. I wish I could find more info on Opal, not much on Google. I'm going to try the Society of Illustrators or Illustration house aft we close the magazine this week. Her stuff is really beautiful. It's a shame that there were so many nameless great artists during that time, it's like the etching guys in books twenty years earlier, amazing art, no credit.
That is great. That’s how I started several centuries ago. HAHA. Bent over a light table and masking out film separations. Love it. Thanks. Slim
You guys are killing me. Haven't heard (or forgot) these terms since my last studio reunion. Survived 35 years of Design Wars. 9 years at two great ad agencies, the rest at the best art studios at the time. 15 years at my own studio. No. 11 blades, #000 rapidiograph, some great brushes and rubber cement were my weapons of choice. When my studio went Mac in 1993 i didn't even know how to turn that thing off at the end of the day. Ah ... the smell of drying rubber cement is almost as sweet as drying lacquer paint. Go Van Gough!
Don't forget about Flowmaster Inks...after spraying that stuff all day out of an airbrush, you'd have a rainbow of brilliantly-colored boogers for at least a week ! http://www.cliff-ruddell.co.uk/gall1.htm
One more thing, we were taught not to use wax. Collected dirt and we were to supply the client with the cleanest mechanicals this side of the Mississippi. Plus, the wax softened in the heat of the car while the artwork (notice this term, our work was referred as "Artwork") and the pasted down items like type and position prints could and would move around. Go Van Gough Part 2!
Cool stories guys - brings back some memories - even if I only witnessed the last days from the rubber cement and repro-camera era.
Was lucky enough to attend the SUNY at Farmingdale in the late sixties, best thing about it was we had great teachers who got sick of the NewYork city grind, and for some reason thought it was preferrable to show us how to be commercial artists...Still use those skills all the time, even in a sheetmetal shop.
Remember in airbrush class you could blow up the plastic ketchup/ water bottles with air and spray down the whole room...people learned to keep their work covered...
HAHAHA, this is to funny. Check out this link. Yes kids this is how it was done. I know. I used to do all this. HAHAHA. http://commfaculty.fullerton.edu/woverbeck/dtr5.htm Notice the orange narrow rectangle. That was the screen display. I think we had 6 fonts. HAHAHA
Ah yes, memories. Line tape, ruby, sharp blades, and cleaning the Rapidographs. I got my first real graphics job in 1990, at the end of this era. I just looked in the dusty old drawer and still have most of this stuff, but haven't used any of it in way over a decade.
The Jalopy Journal
