Illustration | Guillermo Coll

16Nov 2019 by kike_K No Comments

My airbrush

Advertising, Guillermo Coll, Illustration

The US inventor Charles L. Burdick patented the first airbrush in 1893; from that moment on, there has been a love-hate relationship between this tool and the Fine Arts. Some artists rejected using it claiming it was artificial and mechanical while some other enthusiastically welcomed that new device arguing it showed so many possibilities (making realistic, nearly photographic, works was one of those wonderful possibilities). Undoubtedly, some hyper-realistic painters like Audrey Flack, Ralph Goings or Ben Schonzeit have contributed to make this tool so popular. For those artists, the airbrush is a working item and furthermore, one of their ‘distinguishing features’. My very first airbrush was a Holbein Neo-Hohmi. It was a high quality tool but something in its design seemed wrong to me, the side ‘suction-feed’ or siphon tank…

Rory McEwen

Illustration

I have so many reasons to visit a museum, any museum indeed but inevitably all visits end in the bookstore. I am so an unapologetic seeker of rarity, fond of very simple books or catalogues (not really expensive but wonderfully illustrated) that have sometimes showed me the works of unexpected and unknown artists. Among so many great books devoted to Pollock or Warhol it is feasible to find real gems. This happened to me one time in the astonishing bookshop of the Centro Nacional de Arte Reina Sofia. I found a small book about the British artist Rory McEwen (1932-1982); this is a catalogue published by the Royal Botanic Garden of Edinburgh on the occasion of the exhibition of the works by McEwen that took place in 1988. I found…

Roy Cross

Aviation, Illustration, scale replicas

I remember it well, I was eleven, twelve years old and sometimes I had enough money to buy small scale models Airfix Series 1 (in modelling shops or in the toys sections of big department stores). I knew nothing about Tiger Moth biplane but I could pick it if the illustration was the one that caught my eye. These were very simple kits which could be easily assembled during the afternoon and next these were turned into a toy, but quite a different toy because of they were super-detailed and because I had made them all by myself. A few pieces got inevitably lost, sometimes these toys were forgotten as I had bought new ones but as their much pretty boxes seemed timeless, I stored them carefully. Much later,…

Category: Illustration