The trip to the Society of Illustrators was exciting to me, I got to see what illustrations from professionals looked like in person rather than on the internet. I learned a lot more by looking at the work in person, like how if someone wanted to fix a portion of their illustration they had to cut out pieces of the paper it was drawn upon. This makes sense as they would not want to redraw the entire illustration. Nowadays we might use computers for some or all of the work so correcting parts is taken for granted. I also noticed that they used pretty large pieces of paper to draw, another thing people don’t think about today since we can blow an image up digitally; this means they had to draw a lot more and in some ways this is harder.
The illustration that instantly caught my attention was by Orson B. Lowell. It is titled “Birthdays For Everybody, Young And Old. No Mortal Complete WIthout Them.” Orson was a social critic with his illustrations. He liked showing people in awkward situations not in a mean way. In the image we see a man handing out paper with numbers on them which are ages. The young girls are happily taking them while the adult women are running away. This is Orson’s style where he makes commentary on what he sees around him through his illustration. I like the lighthearted message that younger people look forward to birthdays while older people try and fight ageing. I also like how he uses many simple lines to convey shading. The lines on the old man look simple enough yet they give the impression of him wearing some kind of rag like shirt. The use of different lines on the women make it seem like there is a lot of variation in their types of dress. I personally have a hard time inking in such a way but now I want to learn to do it better.
