Friday, December 16, 2011

The Countdown Continues... with 'The 12 Famous Artists of Christmas'

Famous Artist #3: Harold VonSchmidt

Von Schmidt24

Famous Artist #4: Robert Fawcett

Fawcett176

7 comments:

  1. Fawcett didn't draw that face!!! (2nd panel)

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  2. Huh... that's a good question... I'll leave it to one of our Fawcett experts to give us their opinion. Could someone at the ad agency dare to touch up a Fawcett face?

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  3. Though it ran a year later this looks to be the original face. Looking perhaps a bit too smug.

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  4. That Fawcett ad is painful. The man was a genius, but for some reason he could not draw a light romantic scene to save his life. Seems we can add warm, endearing Christmas scenes to the list.

    It looks to me like the face was patched (rather clumsily) to satisfy a client's taste. Did Fawcett do it? Once a client asked Fawcett to modify his illustration of Napoleon's face. Fawcett refused to do it, and when the client insisted, Fawcett took back the illustration and told the client he should start fresh with someone else.

    It's pretty clear that Fawcett didn't care as much about this ad, so it's hard to tell if he did a haphazard job or if the art director had someone patch it.

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  5. Love the VonSchmidt art.

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  6. Love the Von Schmidt art as well.
    Love these those reindeers overflying a somewhat ghostly town.
    So well drawn, the reindeers, anatomically correct as they are; painted in cool shades of blue, including faint Santa under a full moon.

    And then the only warm shades of ochre and yellow in the picture, in sharp contrast to all that cold blue. See that lonesome person, tinged in ochre and yellow, looking out from that window in sheer amazement

    Perhaps thats what's nowadays called a "window of opportunity";?

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  7. However badly drawn this face is, at least it looks like the same guy. The Ad from a year later looks like a completely different person- more like Dana Andrews.
    But it's true, Fawcett is not a great conveyer of levity!

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