Denver and the Digest

Denver Gillen had a long relationship with the Reader's Digest, according to Walt Reed's Illustrator in America.

By design or due to printing limitations, Reader's Digest had a distinctive "gentle" colour palette that afforded its artists the opportunity to create some very appealing art by way of having to work within those parameters.

Denver Gillen did work for many other publications, including the Saturday Evening Post, in a more fully painted style, but even there you can see he was primarily a "linear" illustrator so its easy to see why his very accomplished style would make him a favourite with the Digest's editors.

You'll find several more pieces by this artist in my Denver Gillen Flickr set.