Here's a great original Enoch Bolles painting for a 1928 Film Fun. After taking a closer look at this (the scan, I can only wish I had the painting) you can see the bulls-eye appears to be painted over another pattern, which I am guessing from the shape to be balloons. Bolles did a lot of overpainting, changing details such as hair styles and in this case, reworking the background. Unfortunately he also reused old canvasses, meaning that he overpainted entire cover paintings to save the time and cost of stretching a new canvas. Too bad for us and I can only hope that this wasn't the fate of the motorcycle girl and some of his other classic covers.
I went back and pulled out what other bulls-eye covers I could quickly find (I missed a few good ones) and it turns out that this was a recurring motif for Bolles (it was popular with a lot of illustrators of the time). I made some allowances for what I included in this, and so I thew in ovals and a few other shapes for the fun of it. It's interesting how many variations there are to such a simple theme. I'll upload a few other nice examples in coming posts.
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