The classic illustration blog Today's Inspiration celebrated its 1,000th post yesterday. It's probably safe to assume most of you are well familiar with TI (I get more feeds from it than any other site on the internet). Started four years ago by the commercial illustrator Leif Peng, TI is a wide ranging survey on illustration that balances entertainment with erudition. And of course it is chock full of fabulous scans of great art. Leif's most recent series of posts has been on the manifold genius of Al Parker, but for me (and I suspect many other followers) it is his entries on the many the long forgotten talents that are most inspirational. With passion and conviction, Leif reminds us again and again that there was a time--not that long ago--when illustration was a vibrant, influential field teeming with talent and imagination.I also owe Leif a personal note of gratitude. Two years ago my Enoch Bolles flickr site was 'erased' by an anonymous sysadmin because the scans I posted weren't mine. Leif was sympathetic to my cause and graciously provided me space in TI to write about Enoch Bolles and present some of his art. The enthusiastic feedback I got inspired me in turn to make the leap to create my own blog (shoutout to the Dawl for making it look so good), and Leif''s support has also spawned several other illustration blogs. So let's all raise our glasses to toast Leif and let him know we are looking forward to the next one thousand posts on TI.
P.S.: Leif has posted his top 10 most downloaded images. Can you guess the theme? PINUPS!
2 comments:
Great pic! Is it from a cover or an ad? I'd never seen TI before. Thanks a bunch for that. Here's two interesting letters from Film Fun 6/35 pg 52 "I think your cover artist, Enoch Bolles, holds some sort of record in having more imitators than any other artist." and also "FILM FUN is plenty popular here in Havana." Keep up the great work. I can almost feel our man moving up the charts like a hit record!
Hah! I hadn't seen the letter from the Cuban fan. What a hoot! It's funny because the first thing I do when I get a copy of Film Fun is check out the letters. I'd say in about half the issues there are comments about Bolles. Most are positive but some express their displeasure with his hair color preferences. Usually they complain about too many blondes, which is a joke because Bolles did a lot more redheads than any other color. The image I chose was from a 1930 issue of Pep (alas, it came from a scan as I don't own the issue). I stripped out the text and cloned in some of the missing bits.
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