7 ms·

Norman Rockwell and the golden age of classic food illustration (2019)

64 points by SongofEarth 4y ago

martyvis 4y ago
Nice walk through illustration. One thing that is an error in beginning of the article is to say full colour printing was achieved using red, green and blue. While those primary colours work for additive processes such as on projectors or LCD screens, subtractive methods using ink will need cyan, magenta and yellow pigments (and usually add black)
- magic_hamster 4y ago
  This also baffled me. Did the author mean CMYK?
  - egypturnash 4y ago
    "the author did cursory research, at best, into the minutae of printing, and got it wrong" is a strong possibility.
- Daub 4y ago
  Correct. Cyan, magenta, yellow and black (CMYK) is in fact a derivative of the painter’s color space red, yellow, blue (RYB). But the article is right in that printing technologies heralded a dam burst of classic illustrators: the so called golden age. An illustrator could hand to a printer pretty much anything: a water Colour, oils painting, gauche painting etc. Photo lithography could convert it all to high quality Colour printing plates. Prior to that an illustration had to be specific to the technology: stone lithography, etching, screen printing etc. essentially limiting.
  - zrobotics 4y ago
    Since I'm curious, I'm only familiar with photo lithography from an electronics engineering perspective. A brief search on DDG didn't turn up any technical details on how these illustrations were reproduced. I would be very appreciative if someone could at least point me in the right direction, since reproducing a color image using lithography is extremely interesting. I follow a few artists who do line engraving, so I'd like to see if anyone is doing similar processes as a hobby/small studio effort. All I can find is similar articles to OP that refer to the process but floss over all the technical details.
    - Daub 4y ago
      My experience of this is a bit thin… but I can share what I know. Printing requires that a resist is applied onto a plate, onto which the ink is applied. The function of the resist is to accept or reject the ink. This plate is then pressed on to the paper and the ink is thereby applied or not applied depending on the resist. For most of printing history the resist was a binary: acceptance or rejection of the ink. In the case of Etching (Artists = Dore or Rembrandt) the drawing is applied with a metal spike onto wax covered metal sheet, in Silk screen (artists = Toulouse Lau trek) it is applied as a paint resist on a silk-like fabric, in the case of Woodcut (artists = Durer) it is applied as carved grooves on a wooden block. Lithography (invented Aloys Senefelder in 1798) (artists = Daumier) offered something new: nuance. Lithography as I was taught at school was on stone. Uniquely this was applied as a wax crayon on a stone block. This brought the printing medium closer to drawing (freedom of drawn stroke and subtle tones). Stone lithography was wax (resist) on lime stone blocks. This was traditionally a fine art process, slow and expensive. Offset lithography was on cylindrical metal plate. Parallel to this was the evolution of utilitarian color spaces. Used as the starting point was the artist’s Colour space RYB, whereby all visible colors can be synthesized using a base set of no more than three so-called primaries. Derived from this was the CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow and black) color space. Black was added as the inks that are employed in CMYK have no ‘body’. They are thin and watery. Traditionally they are also of low pigmentation (i.e. cheap). Why cyan, magenta not green and red? That is another story. CMYK and RYB is distinct to red, green and blue (RGB), which defines human vision and projected light. This distinction is the difference between additive and subtractive colors, which is never very effectively explained, but that is yet another story. With all that in place, all that was required was to take a few photos using the appropriate color filters and pass the color-space-seperated result to the printers. each Colour pass was laid down onto the other, the combined result being as bear as damit to the source photo. The issue here was in translating the innate RGB of the camera to the innate CMYK of the printing process. Exact alignment of the separate color passes was an issue. Very fine alignment pins were used to ensure that the different color passes were aligned exactly. The final cookie in the crumble was good quality printing paper, which could accept the inks without dulling the result. The early color plates in classic ‘golden age’ illustrated books where ‘special’. They were protected by thin sheets of non-absorptant paper and printed on special paper stock. Why made offset lithography so significant was that it was the first bridge between photography and printing. Photographs could now be printed. Looked for a good exitstingne]web resource, but found none. Will edit further if anything turns up.
matsemann 4y ago
Not an American, but seen some of these pictures before. I thought most of them actually were photographs, and that it was just the printing and later scanning of them giving them some of the artifacts.
- LegitShady 4y ago
  For me a lot of the magic of Rockwell is his ability to do storytelling in a single frame, and then the quality of his depictions. The people's expressions or posing can almost be cartoony at times, but its so well done it works.
- Daub 4y ago
  He used photo ref heavily. His photos were very carefully taken. He was also very wise in how he used these photos: what to exclude/include. I use him a lot when I talk about reference to my illustration students: https://artsandculture.google.com/story/discover-norman-rockwell-s-reference-photos-for-his-most-famous-paintings/iALCpe8lCP9QJg https://artsandculture.google.com/story/discover-norman-rock... https://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/music-arts/norman-rockwell-photographs-show-technique-behind-master-article-1.1179719 https://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/music-arts/norman-...
  - zrobotics 4y ago
    One thing that the original article pointed out, is that Rockwell emphasized facial features as part of his signature look. For a more exaggerated example, look at faces in anime or Disney animation. IMO part of why Rockwell's images continue to resonate is that he uses exaggerated features sparingly, to draw your eye to a particular part of the image. Looking at the composition, the overall work is photorealistic, except for the features that he was trying to have viewers focus on. Look at the faces in his paintings, they clearly aren't traced over photos. However, large other parts of the illustration do appear to be traced or painted over photographs. Selecting what to emphasize and how to blend it is true artistry. It is a partial shame that most of his output was spent on commercial work, but at the same time that is one of the main reasons he was so prolific.
yboris 4y ago
This year is the golden age for Norman Rockwell - getting summoned from beyond the grave to live on through ML models: https://twitter.com/ai_curio_bot/status/1573845821723918337 https://twitter.com/ai_curio_bot/status/1573845821723918337
- lm28469 4y ago
  https://nitter.net/ai_curio_bot/status/1573845821723918337 https://nitter.net/ai_curio_bot/status/1573845821723918337
- LegitShady 4y ago
  I'd call this at best cultural kitsch. It doesn't look like the painting style or pose decisions/storytelling of rockwell at all.
- collegeburner 4y ago
  those look more like deepfried memes than norman rockwell ngl
dekhn 4y ago
Some of Rockwell's illustrations are close to looking like real life photos.
- gwbas1c 4y ago
  Because he started by staging photographs, and then painting from the photos: https://www.nrm.org/2009/10/norman-rockwell-behind-the-camera-4/#:~:text=Meticulously%20composed%20and%20richly%20detailed,never%20personally%20firing%20the%20shutter https://www.nrm.org/2009/10/norman-rockwell-behind-the-camer....
  - dekhn 4y ago
    Yep, I've been to the Norman Rockwell museum and read through his books. There's a great image of him posing for the native american falling off the cliff in the lower left (https://www.flickr.com/photos/80651083@N00/3638416661 https://www.flickr.com/photos/80651083@N00/3638416661)
gwbas1c 4y ago
(Joke) A lot of those ads are very corny.
dtgriscom 4y ago
That thin, light-gray text is really hard to read. Why choose that, other than "form over function"?
jasonjamerson 4y ago
I prefer his predecessor, J.C Leyendecker, a great illustrator and also a prolific painter of food: https://news.artnet.com/app/news-upload/2021/09/saturday-evening-post-leyendecker-791x1024.jpg https://news.artnet.com/app/news-upload/2021/09/saturday-eve...

64 points by SongofEarth 4y ago

Nice walk through illustration. One thing that is an error in beginning of the article is to say full colour printing was achieved using red, green and blue. While those primary colours work for additive processes such as on projectors or LCD screens, subtractive methods using ink will need cyan, magenta and yellow pigments (and usually add black)

magic_hamster 4y ago
This also baffled me. Did the author mean CMYK?
- egypturnash 4y ago
  "the author did cursory research, at best, into the minutae of printing, and got it wrong" is a strong possibility.
Daub 4y ago
Correct. Cyan, magenta, yellow and black (CMYK) is in fact a derivative of the painter’s color space red, yellow, blue (RYB). But the article is right in that printing technologies heralded a dam burst of classic illustrators: the so called golden age. An illustrator could hand to a printer pretty much anything: a water Colour, oils painting, gauche painting etc. Photo lithography could convert it all to high quality Colour printing plates. Prior to that an illustration had to be specific to the technology: stone lithography, etching, screen printing etc. essentially limiting.
- zrobotics 4y ago
  Since I'm curious, I'm only familiar with photo lithography from an electronics engineering perspective. A brief search on DDG didn't turn up any technical details on how these illustrations were reproduced. I would be very appreciative if someone could at least point me in the right direction, since reproducing a color image using lithography is extremely interesting. I follow a few artists who do line engraving, so I'd like to see if anyone is doing similar processes as a hobby/small studio effort. All I can find is similar articles to OP that refer to the process but floss over all the technical details.
  - Daub 4y ago
    My experience of this is a bit thin… but I can share what I know. Printing requires that a resist is applied onto a plate, onto which the ink is applied. The function of the resist is to accept or reject the ink. This plate is then pressed on to the paper and the ink is thereby applied or not applied depending on the resist. For most of printing history the resist was a binary: acceptance or rejection of the ink. In the case of Etching (Artists = Dore or Rembrandt) the drawing is applied with a metal spike onto wax covered metal sheet, in Silk screen (artists = Toulouse Lau trek) it is applied as a paint resist on a silk-like fabric, in the case of Woodcut (artists = Durer) it is applied as carved grooves on a wooden block. Lithography (invented Aloys Senefelder in 1798) (artists = Daumier) offered something new: nuance. Lithography as I was taught at school was on stone. Uniquely this was applied as a wax crayon on a stone block. This brought the printing medium closer to drawing (freedom of drawn stroke and subtle tones). Stone lithography was wax (resist) on lime stone blocks. This was traditionally a fine art process, slow and expensive. Offset lithography was on cylindrical metal plate. Parallel to this was the evolution of utilitarian color spaces. Used as the starting point was the artist’s Colour space RYB, whereby all visible colors can be synthesized using a base set of no more than three so-called primaries. Derived from this was the CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow and black) color space. Black was added as the inks that are employed in CMYK have no ‘body’. They are thin and watery. Traditionally they are also of low pigmentation (i.e. cheap). Why cyan, magenta not green and red? That is another story. CMYK and RYB is distinct to red, green and blue (RGB), which defines human vision and projected light. This distinction is the difference between additive and subtractive colors, which is never very effectively explained, but that is yet another story. With all that in place, all that was required was to take a few photos using the appropriate color filters and pass the color-space-seperated result to the printers. each Colour pass was laid down onto the other, the combined result being as bear as damit to the source photo. The issue here was in translating the innate RGB of the camera to the innate CMYK of the printing process. Exact alignment of the separate color passes was an issue. Very fine alignment pins were used to ensure that the different color passes were aligned exactly. The final cookie in the crumble was good quality printing paper, which could accept the inks without dulling the result. The early color plates in classic ‘golden age’ illustrated books where ‘special’. They were protected by thin sheets of non-absorptant paper and printed on special paper stock. Why made offset lithography so significant was that it was the first bridge between photography and printing. Photographs could now be printed. Looked for a good exitstingne]web resource, but found none. Will edit further if anything turns up.

matsemann 4y ago

Not an American, but seen some of these pictures before. I thought most of them actually were photographs, and that it was just the printing and later scanning of them giving them some of the artifacts.

LegitShady 4y ago
For me a lot of the magic of Rockwell is his ability to do storytelling in a single frame, and then the quality of his depictions. The people's expressions or posing can almost be cartoony at times, but its so well done it works.
Daub 4y ago
He used photo ref heavily. His photos were very carefully taken. He was also very wise in how he used these photos: what to exclude/include. I use him a lot when I talk about reference to my illustration students: https://artsandculture.google.com/story/discover-norman-rockwell-s-reference-photos-for-his-most-famous-paintings/iALCpe8lCP9QJg https://artsandculture.google.com/story/discover-norman-rock... https://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/music-arts/norman-rockwell-photographs-show-technique-behind-master-article-1.1179719 https://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/music-arts/norman-...
- zrobotics 4y ago
  One thing that the original article pointed out, is that Rockwell emphasized facial features as part of his signature look. For a more exaggerated example, look at faces in anime or Disney animation. IMO part of why Rockwell's images continue to resonate is that he uses exaggerated features sparingly, to draw your eye to a particular part of the image. Looking at the composition, the overall work is photorealistic, except for the features that he was trying to have viewers focus on. Look at the faces in his paintings, they clearly aren't traced over photos. However, large other parts of the illustration do appear to be traced or painted over photographs. Selecting what to emphasize and how to blend it is true artistry. It is a partial shame that most of his output was spent on commercial work, but at the same time that is one of the main reasons he was so prolific.

yboris 4y ago

This year is the golden age for Norman Rockwell - getting summoned from beyond the grave to live on through ML models: https://twitter.com/ai_curio_bot/status/1573845821723918337 https://twitter.com/ai_curio_bot/status/1573845821723918337

lm28469 4y ago
https://nitter.net/ai_curio_bot/status/1573845821723918337 https://nitter.net/ai_curio_bot/status/1573845821723918337
LegitShady 4y ago
I'd call this at best cultural kitsch. It doesn't look like the painting style or pose decisions/storytelling of rockwell at all.
collegeburner 4y ago
those look more like deepfried memes than norman rockwell ngl

dekhn 4y ago

Some of Rockwell's illustrations are close to looking like real life photos.

gwbas1c 4y ago
Because he started by staging photographs, and then painting from the photos: https://www.nrm.org/2009/10/norman-rockwell-behind-the-camera-4/#:~:text=Meticulously%20composed%20and%20richly%20detailed,never%20personally%20firing%20the%20shutter https://www.nrm.org/2009/10/norman-rockwell-behind-the-camer....
- dekhn 4y ago
  Yep, I've been to the Norman Rockwell museum and read through his books. There's a great image of him posing for the native american falling off the cliff in the lower left (https://www.flickr.com/photos/80651083@N00/3638416661 https://www.flickr.com/photos/80651083@N00/3638416661)

gwbas1c 4y ago

(Joke) A lot of those ads are very corny.

dtgriscom 4y ago

That thin, light-gray text is really hard to read. Why choose that, other than "form over function"?

jasonjamerson 4y ago

I prefer his predecessor, J.C Leyendecker, a great illustrator and also a prolific painter of food: https://news.artnet.com/app/news-upload/2021/09/saturday-evening-post-leyendecker-791x1024.jpg https://news.artnet.com/app/news-upload/2021/09/saturday-eve...