Sunday 5 June 2011

When Deadlines Loom...

Here is a photograph of a guy and his gal taken, I would hazard a guess, in 1957.

But the location for the photo shoot would have been Bolton, Lancashire - not downtown L.A. in California.

And the man in question isn't some gun totin' crazy, it is in fact the illustrator Denis McLoughlin and his lovely missus Dorothy.

Denis McLoughlin  was wrestling with deadlines - so what else was new for the man also referred to as publisher T.V. Boardman's one man art department?  He'd  just produced fully painted (as in time consuming fully painted) covers for Jack Webb's Bad Blonde and Robert Bloomfield's When Strangers Meet, he was also producing all the artwork for T.V.B's Buffalo Bill Annuals and his schedule was so hectic that he would sometimes find himself having to bat out three covers in a day.

Those deadlines weren't going to go away anytime soon.

So...

instead of using a photo as reference he would occasionally  treat the photo as an element of the artwork as in the case of Sam Ross's The Tight Corner.






A pragmatic but nevertheless punchy approach to deadline busting. Illustrators and their wives never looked sharper.

1 comment:

  1. I don't think you can save yourself from deadlines, at least not for too long ;) But this is why proper management and careful planning is so crucial. Thanks to microsoft dynamics things get much easier to manage, trust me on this one!

    ReplyDelete