Happy Halloween!

Above, a greeting card by the ever bright Mary Engelbreit.

Below, talk about awkward family photos. That's me, with my brother on the left, way back in '57, trick or treating ('course my mom didn't get around to developing the film 'til the following January, which for us was perty fast). I have no recollection as to why my brother was inhabiting that particular persona, and let's not ask him as I feel it's a repressed memory for the guy.
I don't expect one person to pluck this photo, but it's cathartic for me to post it.

All Hallows Eve Ball

Shmaybe just a li'l bitty more Halloweenie Mutts? By Patrick McDonnell? Copyright by him? Every last little drawing by McDonnell is either funny or fun.

All Together . . . !

Who doesn't love Patrick McDonnell's Mutts, especially the early strips. His splash panels for the Sunday strips are a graphic historian's delight, nearly always a Mutts homage take-off on some classic graphic of our times. Here's one and, what a coincidensh, in the shpirit of Halloween.

The above poster borrowed from Mr. Door Tree.

Wonderful

Staying with the always wonderful New Yorker covers, let's use the cover below by the wonderful Owen Smith as a segue between Halloween witches and Halloween pumpkins:

Below, the wonderful children's book illustrator William Joyce:

Below, the wonderful William Steig:

Below, the wonderful Charles Addams:

Below, the wonderful George Booth:

Below, the wonderful Warren Miller:

Below, the wonderful Peter de Seve, with a wonderful tribute to New York's finest, just a month after their darkest hour:

Below, not a New Yorker cover, and no punkins, but entitled Trick or Treat, again by the wonderful Peter de Seve:

Addams Witches

A quartet of Charles Addams New Yorker Halloween covers—not as spooky as I'd like them to be, but hey—

True Vision

Ah, the always wonderful work of William Stout. This image gives us a true vision of what these seemingly youthful and seductive witches really look like.

William Stout — Halloween — 1995

Witchery

While these drawings by Stephen Fabian are not my favorite by him, they certainly fit the bill for our theme of witchery, and certainly not the hags that we expect this time of year.

Fabian — Witch House

Fabian — Psyche the Witch Girl

Fabian — The Witch Before the Altar

Fabian — Gillian the Witch - from Bell, Book and Candle

Fabian — Witch's Spell

The Witches' Well

A variety of witches—barely dipping into the well . . .

Willy Pogany

Willy Pogany

H.J. Ford

Albert Hurter

O'Malley

Ida Outhwaite

Ida Outhwaite

Lawrence Stevens

My FAVORITE: Yoshitaka Amano

That Time of Year

It's that time of year when witches are more likely to come to mind, with all the stereotypical associations such as the witch's familiar, the black cat.

Black Cat — © Meg Dawson

I think the next few posts will be witch oriented, mostly stereotypical but with a couple exceptions.

Strauss

Reproductions of this poster are for sale all over the internet, but all their scans are pretty tiny. I thought I'd offer you a nice scan of it, and imagine this, for free!

Ludwig Hohlwein — 1910

Four Oaks

The female nude form dominates the history of art and decorative illustration, and apparently the posts of this blog. But there are some seemingly rare examples of using the decorative male nude form, such as this suite of drawings by Beatrice Stevens, from the 1920s—much in the spirit of Franklin Booth.

The drawing suite is entitled Four Oaks, with subtitles referring to the four movements of classical musical compositions—allegro, andante, scherzo, and allegro con brio.

Four Oaks — Allegro

Four Oaks — Andante

Four Oaks — Scherzo

Four Oaks — Allegro con brio

Ah, If Only

I'm out of touch the next couple of days. Will return to posting on Sunday.

'Til then, one more Dulac, this from later in his work, showing his simplified stylism. Still beautiful, still full of lovely texture. Ah, if only Fantasia's centaurettes had been designed by Dulac. I believe this was a design for a quilt.

Fairy-Tale Exquisite

Let's stay with Dulac for a moment or two.

This is an untitled, undated and generally unpublished watercolor of characters from popular nursery rhymes of Dulac's time. His texture and pattern in even the smallest areas — such as the costume fabrics — is fairy-tale exquisite.

Father Time

Father Time got a grip on me, stressing me with too many deadlines and too little time, absent-mindedly turning his hourglass over and over, faster and faster. Somewhere up on his infinite dusty shelves is a bottle with a little extra time that I sure could use. But he's too busy checking in on the young and the beautiful, bestowing them with Good Luck and Elixirs of Peace.

Edmund Dulac — Father Time —1906

An Incident on Barsoom

Ah. Roy Krenkel and Barsoom.

Need I say more?

Lordly Giant of Planets

I pulled these two pages together from my slush pile of Golden Age pages, sliced decades ago from Planet Comics, drawn by a young Murphy Anderson. It's a sweet piece of eye candy.

Winged Victory

Sorry my postings have been a bit sparse. I'm in deadline crunch with no less than 6 projects all coming due at the same general time, and the stress is killin' me. Let me get through the next couple of weeks with some spotty (but neat!) stuff, and I'll make it up to ya.

Here's a nice bookplate, by Garth Jones, a great penman of the early 1900s. It was adhered in a Leon Uris book that I bought some years ago at a garage sale, and I have no idea if it belonged to THE John Knowles of A Separate Peace fame. That Knowles was born too late to have had Jones design it for him, but he could have easily had the design adapted for his use. Who knows . . . anyway, I think the winged victory filigree is lovely.

Compose the Troubled Spirit

Illuminated text designed & executed by F.Sangorski and G.Sutcliffe — 1910

AMEN to that brother! Good night and pleasant dreams!