Skip to main content

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.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Axel Foley's Chevy Nova (1/25 scale model)

Multiple tributes, here. I remember first seeing  Beverly Hills Cop  on video at my friend Chris K's house, 'cause his family had a VCR and we'd watch tons of movies (and record music videos) together. The summer of 1984 was a special time for us (having created a strong bond in school since Grade 6 a few years before), going on biking adventures around the 'burbs and into the city, etc., and home video played an important role from then until I moved to the opposite end of Scarborough just before we started high school. We liked the movie a lot, both of us fans of Eddie Murphy from his  Saturday Night Live  days. I don't think I'd seen the movie since then (it would have been 1985, probably summer, since the movie came out in late 1984) and I became curious to see if it still held up. It did. It does. I found Murphy as charming as ever and the comedy (and even the action) holds up very well and its very re-watchable and very entertaining.  Beverly Hi...

Small Pond Arts Puppet Wagon (1/24 scale model)

I dreamed up the Small Pond Shipyard for my fanciful scratch-built sci-fi airship creations (which still only exist in sketch/Photoshop mock-up form (and boxes in my closet) for now), but more and more ideas kept coming ( this wind turbine , for example, will be part of a rather elaborate diorama I'll be working on this winter). But the Puppet Wagon was a sleeper surprise, to be sure. [Really, though, I don't know why I was so eager to build this right away since I was planning to slowly develop my modelling skills with simpler builds first and the work my way up to more complicated projects.] Not all parts were used/needed. Most of these ideas have come from watching modelling videos online, and when I saw a review of this sweet little Japanese "Ramen Shop" food truck by Aoshima (right-side drive!), my brain started making jokes about customizing it to the weird food truck ideas I'd been posting on Facebook. But the more I thought about what the co...

City of Angels

17" x 11", watercolour and digital, 1999 Ah, City of Angels . I thought I was getting cool film noir but got a cheesy musical instead (Google it if you must). Still, it was fun to make the poster and associated images, mostly because the research consisted of watching real films noir and buying a great book on movie posters of the genre. I made tons of sketches and a few digital mock-ups. For the final poster above, I made three separate watercolour paintings (one of the couple and one each of the two black and white heads) and composited them in Photoshop, where I also added the text. In true movie poster fashion, I wanted the actors names to be the top two names, but I lost that battle and had to use the characters' names instead. It looks fine, but it implies that "Kingsley and Stone" are the lead actors in the show. Oh, well...it's only community theatre... By making the "angel" above half black and white and half colour, th...