Fashion Illustration: The Evolution of Style By Jackie Zhu Fashion illustration has always engaged audiences, originally serving a promotional role for fashion magazines, clothing designers, and department stores which sold their wares. This style of illustration is usually exaggerated to express and elevate the elegance and

Ezra Jack Keats’ The Snowy Day  By Melissa Crowton The modern picture book has come a long way. Not only has the medium and the format been explored, but the content has evolved to reflect the changing social consciousness. Ezra Jack Keats’s picture book, A Snowy Day

Jessie Willcox Smith and the First Children’s Book Week Poster By Ashley Yazdani By Ashley Yazdani In 1919, just after the First World War, a small group of Americans gathered to establish the first official Children’s Book Week, and to help communicate their cause they commissioned

Witches Night Out by Barbara Rundback Owen Smith (b. 1964) Halloween New Yorker, 2000 Cover illustration for The New Yorker (November 6, 2000)   Halloween, or All Hallows Eve,  is one of the times that harmful spirits are said to be active. In the U.S., we

The End by Barbara Rundback The illustrator Howard Pyle understood the essential elements of imagining the termination of a life or illustrating the passage of a lifetime. In the vignette seen below, he pictured an artist (himself really) seated under his umbrella painting the ruins of

Visual Thrills By Joyce K. Schiller, Curator, Rockwell Center for American Visual Studies         Robert Crumb (b. 1943) Cheap Thrills   1967 Album cover for Big Brother and the Holding Company   The cover art of the Cheap Thrills album is one of

Shifting Visions of Vaporous Artistry By Joyce K. Schiller, Curator, Rockwell Center for American Visual Studies There is something distinctive and magical about the way J. C. Leyendecker conveyed the fleeting properties of steam, smoke, and fog in his illustrations. His stylized (sometimes art nouveau-inspired)

Illustrating Active, Sporting Women By Joyce K. Schiller, Curator, Rockwell Center for American Visual Studies As early as 1893, Vogue magazine began commissioning illustrators to include images of active young woman participating in sporting activities. For example, the American illustrator  Charles M. Relyea (1863-1932) produced cover