New School Vs Old School: Gil Elvgren And Jon Whit

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New School vs Old School: Gil Elvgren and Jon Whitcomb Gil Elvgren and Jon Whitcomb are both each others contemporary, celebrated and famous illustrators of their era. The Old School didn’t just disappear when New School was presented. Gil Elvgren and his popular pin up oil paintings are the best examples of the 1950’s Old School Illustration. Beautiful soft edges and forms, colorful images. He had a sensual style but he managed to describe it in an elegant and not offensive way. Jon Whitcomb represented the New School’s innovations. He still based his illustration on the previous advertising era’s style, but instead of rendering the whole image perfectly, he only rendered and draw the details on the parts where the focal point was and he used simple,flat geometrical shapes and patterns to accent that focal point even more (just like Coles Phillips, Joseph Leyendecker) . Lost and found edges appeared especially on the clothes of the figures in his illustrations, which we’ve already seen in the era of The Roaring Twenties. New School Illustration was an innovation. People wanted a break after the war. They wanted to forget and take a deep breath. The war scenes and the fictional stories were replaced by the idealism, images of beautiful women idols, vivid colors and anything that illustrates and brings positive energy to the people. When photography replaced illustration,it forced the field of Illustrators to come up with something different, than the realistic well rendered style which everyone could get from photographs. That’s when they started to use the method of rendering just part of the image. Gouache became the most typical medium instead of the slow drying oil. Pictures were brighter and flatter with graphic shapes and bold color schemes. Television was another issue, nobody wanted to buy magazines, everyone was saving the money to get a TV instead.

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