To start collecting reference for this project I started a pinterest board to start a digital pin board. It does feel like a digital mood board and I did find it very handy in this project. Please click the image below for a direct link to my pinterest board for this project. I pinned photographs of people and homes as well as illustrations and adverts from the time.

As well as using pinterest and google I also found the following websites very handy, particularly the Historic UK site. This website has multiple links regarding all different topics/aspects of life in the 1950’s.

Website addresses;
Historic UK – 1950s
National Archives
History Today

I also used this project as an excuse to rewatch some of my favourite 1950’s movies and television shows. I rewatched ‘Some Like It Hot’ (1959)  and I also rewatched some episodes of ‘I Love Lucy’ (1951-1957). Both are American productions and I did try to stick to UK references for this project but I Love Lucy was groundbreaking and is considered the greatest TV Show of all time. Some Like it Hot also still stands up today and is considered one of the greatest movies of all time.

This is London Reel 1 (1950) – Youtube
London Girls (1954) – British Pathe – Youtube
Blackpool Holiday (1957) – Youtube

I also watched the above videos so that I would be able to reference the era better – to get a feel for how the landscape looked, how people dress and act. I am a vintage/history lover and the 1950’s is my favourite era of design and fashion, so I have to say that I really loved being to indulge in this material. The people are all so well dressed compared to today and with no personal technology people are all out and about and conversing with one another. I found the video of Blackpool one of mixed emotion. It is filmed so well, it is truly a candid look at holiday makers of the time, and again I love the way people are dressed. However I used to live in Blackpool and recently visited and seeing how downhill it has gone is very sad. In this video it is a real resort, everyone is dressed up and having a great time and I recognised so many of the places in the video.

I made a mind-map and mood-board in my sketchbook thinking about what I had seen in the videos and on the websites. I wanted to make sure that I didn’t gloss over the political climate of the 1950’s. I think it is very easy to idealise by gone eras, but the 1950’s was not an equal time by anyone standards. Women had their places, and as you can see from the videos it was certainly not a time where diversity of any sort.

After that I drew things I had found on my pinterest board in the same way I did for the ‘Turning Words Into Pictures’ exercise. I drew quickly and without worrying about each image being perfect. I really like some of the end drawings though, particularly the pyrex dish with the leaves on. I used all of the things in the previous exercises to help me plan this drawing and it really paid off in the end result. By exploring in this way I definitely had a more solid plan when I went into the final drawing.

Next I started planning my final drawing, I started in my sketchbook and then made a couple of quick mock ups in procreate. In the first pages I was trying to think of an idea how I could have an illustration of someone in a chair but make it clearly 1950s. I decided to have a woman in the role of the home maker which is typical of the time and have the man of the house sat in the chair. I played around with a couple of ideas and I thought I had settled on the idea of the wife serving the husband at the table. I quickly sketched it up in procreate but I just wasn’t happy with it. I was trying to keep the target audience in mind – would a teenager look at this and understand what I was trying to portray. I was happy with the background I had created of the room though, so I decided to keep that but use the idea of the man watching television from one of the other thumbnails. I added the wife, she is wearing an apron and has a cloth (cleaning the cabinet) – I thought that this made it more clear that she is working whilst the man is sitting. I also thought this opened the room up a little and made for a more interesting composition – particularly for a young person to look at.

All of the things around the room are directly inspired by images off my pinterest boards. The lamp, rug, bird ornaments and display cabinet. I even used the photographs of real living rooms to create a colour palette for this illustration. I lined the background first and then the figures on the next layer as I just wanted to ensure that they were in correct proportion with their surroundings. If I was making this piece traditionally I wouldn’t have done this and would have just spent more time on this initial sketch to make sure it was all correct but that is definitely one of the perks of digital illustration. I decided to work digitally as I thought it would be more appealing to a younger audience (especially teenagers today).

I created a repeat pattern for the rug (based off the photographs). I then cleaned the edges up altered the opacity so it would blend better with the background. I tried to create a blend of modern and vintage illustration with this drawing – by using typical digital colouring methods but blended with using a halftone brush in procreate to add a vintage element. Unfortunately when I have uploaded my images to wordpress the quality has been compressed to a point where you can’t quite see this effect (I am having trouble with them asking me to upgrade to better support my blog).

I added a picture on to the television – I added a very simple blurry picture of men on a football pitch – this is a nod to the 1954 world cup which was the first world cup to be broadcast on BBC. The bottom right corner of the image ended up feeling very empty – I had drawn the woman standing a lot further forward in my initial plan but in order to make it look like she was actually cleaning the cabinet I ended up drawing her further back. I toy around with a couple of ideas – one of which was a houseplant but it just looked unnatural due to the placement. I ended up decided on a pet – in this case a dog. I drew a poodle as it was one of the most popular dogs in the 1950’s and I thought it would be a good one to represent the era as it has dropped out of fashion now – many of the other breeds wouldn’t be any different to those today.

Here is the finished illustration, I think it does successfully give a teenager an idea of the 1950’s. I am happy with the overall result of the illustration but there are certainly a lot of flaws. The man in the chair is not natural looking – his legs look too bulky compared the rest of the body. I feel like the chair needs to be bigger at the bottom as well. The figures do appear more stiff than I would like them to be as well – I definitely need to work on making figures appear more dynamic – I do think that I do lose some expression when I line the sketch.