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Lincoln's Bicentennial Revisited


Finally: two examples of how my watercolour paintings of Abraham Lincoln and the two historic steam trains (discussed back in February) turned out on the printed material Union Pacific used to promote Lincoln's Bicentennial and his involvement with uniting the country through the railway. The top card is about 8.5" x 5" and there's nothing printed on the back. The bottom card (7" x 3") has the same Lincoln painting on the front as the top one, but with no text. Seen here is the back of the card with my painting(s) of the steam engines. There was also a 17" x 10" poster printed with Abe on the front (vertically) and the trains on the back (horizontally and much bigger, showing off the great details). The top card has a white border, as does the back of the bottom one, but the Abe image on the other side of the bottom card (not pictured) goes right to the edges.

To ensure those great details on the trains, I painted them and the background for them separately. If I remember correctly, each train painting ended up being done on a 15" x 22" piece of watercolour paper and the BG was maybe a little smaller. The folks at Bailey Lauerman then composited these into one image. They also did a seamless job of compositing my revised Lincoln onto my original painting.

I'm very happy with how my illustrations came out and also pleased that Bailey Lauerman did such a great job with the design and the printing. It was well worth the lack of sleep during that brief period.

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