Before the austerity imposed by World War II, produce in the US was shipped in wooden crates with colorful, carefully designed and illustrated labels, meant to set each producer apart from the others.

The relatively sudden advent of cheaper cardboard boxes left many of the crate labels unused and they have become collectors items.

A recent post on MetaFilter has pointed out several sources for images of some of the labels, and other sources of information about the market for them as collectables.

The Boston Public Library’s Flickr set has the best and largest images, along with the Los Angeles Public Library.

There are more, with smaller images, on BlueSkySearch. The Crate Label Museum is most extensive, though the images are unfortunately small (note the dropdown at lower right to select categories, and note that many categories go on for several numbered pages).

Kris Wiltse is an illustrator and gallery artist based in Washington State.

In her illustration work she favors the unusual medium of block printing, working in linocut, woodcut and scratchboard.

Wiltse also works in watercolor for her gallery art and personal sketching, as well as for a secondary speciality in interpretive signs — informative location signage that depicts birds and other wildlife and flora in and around the area of Puget Sound.

Her website has galleries of each. The sketches and more finished watercolors have a nicely informal feeling, with fresh color and a sense of immediacy.

Her vibrant block print illustrations have served clients that include The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, Wired and Atlantic Monthly, among others.

Her site also includes video watercolor demonstrations.

In addition there are galleries of her illustration work on the site of her artist representatives, Morgan Gaynin, as well as Workbook and Directory of Illustration.

Wiltse also has a Flickr set of sketches and location drawings that is more extensive than the selection on her website. It also includes additional selections of her block prints and photos of her block print process.

In a recent post to his always interesting column, J.J. Sedelmaier has written an article for Imprint on a fascinating promotional poster series in Chicago in the early 20th century: A True Visionary Gives Chicago A Landmark Branding Campaign Circa 1920-30.

With the help of Dave at Poster Plus, Sedelmaier has accompanied the article with numerous examples of these beautiful posters, most of which are linked to much larger versions.

In sharp contrast to many articles you might see on the web about older posters, these are not only credited to the artists who designed them, but arranged by artist within the context of the article.

Wonderful.

Also reprinted on Salon.com as Posters that rival the London Underground.

(Images above, pairs are by the same artist: Willard Frederic Elmes, Otto Brennemann, Hazel B. Urgelles, Norman Erickson, Oscar Rabe Hanson, Robert Beebe, Arthur A. Johnson, Willard Frederic Elmes)

Every so often, I like to check back on artists that I’ve written about previously and see if the internet, in its seemingly endless capacity to expand and grow, has graced us with additional image resources for the artist’s work that I didn’t offer in my original post.

In the case of Golden Age illustrator Charles Robinson, who I wrote about in 2007, I’m delighted to say the answer is an emphatic yes.

You might say that illustration was in Charles Robinson’s blood, his father was an illustrator, as were his brothers Thomas Heath Robinson and William Heath Robinson. Elder brother William is the best known of the three, and Charles is sometimes in his shadow, Thomas definitely so.

It’s unfortunate that the work of all three brothers doesn’t receive the attention it deserves.

The good news is that those additional resources I mentioned include several complete books illustrated by Charles, and one with work by all three brothers, now available on the Internet Archive. These, unlike some illustrated books featured on the Archive, have quite good reproductions of the illustrations.

The books feature both color reproductions and a wealth of Robinson’s beautiful ink drawings, reproduced better and in more quantity than I’ve previously seen, and I have to say they have raised my appreciation of Robinson as a pen and ink artist.

Each of the books can be flipped through page by page, or accessed through a page of thumbnails. In addition to the full illustrations, there are numerous spot illustrations and page decorations.

[I found the Internet Archive entries courtesy of this post on The Art of Charles Robinson on "{ feuilleton }", the blog of artist and designer John Coulthart, and I recommend browsing through his Illustrators Archive (Time-Sink Warning).]

Christopher Peterson is an illustrator known in particular for his rock posters. He also does a variety of illustration, storyboards, set designs and exhibit concept designs.

Originally from New York, Peterson studied at the Art Institute of Boston and the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. His clients include Time Magazine, The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, Readers Digest, Fortune, McGraw-Hill, Watson-Guptill, Macy’s, Courvoisier, Warner Brothers, Joe Boxer and Bill Graham Presents, among others; and his rock posters have included such performers as Paul McCartney, Phish, The String Cheese Incident, Sting, Eric Clapton, Elvis Costello, John Hiatt, Taj Mahal and Gloria Estefan.

Peterson’s approach varies from relatively highly rendered, to painterly to loose and sketchlike. His website features sections for posters, illustration, concept renderings and sketches, and you can find an additional portfolio of his work on the Shannon Associates artists’ representative site.

I particularly enjoy the fun conceptual devices he employs in his rock posters, with band names and concert information arrayed on grain elevators, buildings, room interiors, train cars and the like.

Based in Madrid, Spain, Felideus (pen name for Juan Parra) has worked as an art director, animator, screenwriter and graphic designer for film and video productions, and is now a freelance illustrator, designer and writer.

As a writer and illustrator, Felideus has worked on book projects and in comic books.

He works both in traditional media like watercolor, acrylic, pencil and ink, and in digital media, using applications like Photoshop and Painter.

Felideus maintains a blog which also functions as his website, though the Portfolio section is labeled as Under Construction, and points to his portfolios on CG Society, deviantART, CG Gallery CGHub and Behance.

These appear somewhat redundant. I found the ones on CG Society or CG Hub as complete as any.

His blog, however, provides discussion of the work, names the projects for which the illustrations were intended, and provides additional images, including detail crops and in some cases, step-through process in the form of animated GIFs. The most recent blog entries feature translations of the text in four languages.

Felideus’ highly rendered, richly detailed style feels fresh and resists any feeling of being overworked, partly because of his superb use of value and color, and partly in his use of texture, contrasting highly detailed passages with areas that are almost flat. I particularly like the way he uses a limited palette and deft control of value, to push layers of an image back and dramatically bring others forward.

His more recent images, some of which are part of an advertising campaign for Buskers beer, and a few of which are for an in progress book project called “The Automatic Forest” (images above, bottom two) carry echoes of some of the Golden Age illustrators who worked in detailed and highly textural styles, like Arthur Rackham and Gustav Tenggren. Felideus manages at the same time to make his images feel ancient and modern, and uses his digital tools to great advantage.

If you stopped by Lines and Colors yesterday, January 18, you may have noticed that Lines and Colors had gone dark, along with a significant number of other sites, in protest, and to raise awareness of the “anti-piracy” internet censorship bills looming in the U.S. Congress.

If you didn’t happen to stop by yesterday, but would like to know more about why it matters, what I had to say about the issue, and why the continued existence of Lines and Colors and websites like it hinges on the defeat of these bills, here is the page that was up in place of the site yesterday.

The effort to raise awareness of this issue across the web has apparently begun to have an effect, as a number of legislators have withdrawn their support for the bills, at least in their current form. But the fight is far from over; the hugely powerful and influential lobbies that represent the entertainment industry will not slink quietly away and call it a day; they will continue to pressure congress to give them the kind of extraordinary and frightening control over internet content that these bills provide.

Those in other countries may feel this doesn’t affect them (it will if hundreds or thousands of websites go dark at the whim of the big corporations), or you may feel frustrated that you can’t affect it directly. Right now, the spread of information and awareness is important, and those of you in Europe and elsewhere will soon enough have your own fight on your hands over similar legislation that these companies are trying to force into law around the world.

Those in the U.S. can directly affect the immediate danger of these bills passing by calling or writing your U.S. senators and representatives and urging them to reject the bills. Here is a site called Stop American Censorship that has more information on how easy it is to do that.

I’m not exaggerating when I say that if these bills pass, Lines and Colors, and significant other portions of the web, will cease to exist.

-Charley

Originally from Ohio and now living and working in Michigan, Steven Hughes is a freelance illustrator and an Assistant professor of illustration at Northern Michigan University.

His clients include American Greetings, Ohio Magazine, Cleveland Magazine, University of Dayton and others.

His website (I love the URL: primaryhugues.com) essentially opens up to his portfolio, which festures work in both traditional and digital media.

The section for Paintings includes his nicely rendered poster images of baseball players, along with more conceptual pieces like his portrayal of Ben Franklin as an electrical socket.

Note that the images are often accompanied by work in progress images, accessed from small links just above them.

Tucked away in the “Paintings” list is a selection of “Cityscapes”, which are location paintings for gallery exhibit and private commissions. Again, there are several images accessed from links at top.

The “Drawings” section includes sketchbook pages, which have a nice feeling of “draw whatever is in front of you” subject selections, along with more finished still life drawings and figure drawings.

Hughes also has a blog. Though not recently updated, it includes additional work in progress images as well as additional context for some of his portfolio images.

There is a brief interview with Hughes on The Artfuls.