[The forthcoming book about the art of Austin Briggs, from Auad Publishing, is now at the printer. Unfortunately, there was not enough room in the book for many great images. Rather than return them to obscurity, I've decided to show several outtakes on this blog between now and the publication date.]
I love Austin Briggs' preliminary drawing of five girls marching in a line through a bar.
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| Drawing courtesy of Roger Reed at Illustration House |
Note how Briggs uses the angles of their hats to show their individual characters. The eldest girl is prim and decorous but by the time we get to the pile up at the end, all decorum is gone:
Briggs adopted a similar approach for the little girls greeting their daddy in the following ad for Douglas Airliners. Even with his rough, sketchy technique and their backs turned to the viewer, each of these girls has a distinctive personality:
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| The shy one hides behind her mother, the excitable one leaps in the air, and the middle one wobbles indecisively. |
The drawing is intended to look spontaneous but Briggs did at least a dozen preliminary sketches, trying to tie a hair ribbon on a bouncing ping pong ball.
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| This large sketch (19" x 25") and others were tossed on the floor of Briggs' studio as he worked. That's Briggs' shoe print in the upper right corner. |
When Briggs captured touches he liked, he incorporated them in the final drawing.
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| Briggs' experience shows up in that hand |
Before he turned to his charcoal illustrations, Briggs made his reputation doing fully painted illustrations. Here he paints frisky children in an ad for dog food
He employed a lively brush technique to keep his painting active:
Still, at some point in his career he seems to have realized that the medium of paint unavoidably civilized his pictures. If he wanted to convey the indecorum of little girls, a crayon or vine charcoal was a more suitable medium.
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| Despite the seeming crudeness of this line, note how sensitively Briggs depicts the curiosity and lack of coordination in those young fingers. |
In an era of slick, full color illustration Briggs was a pioneer in making these basic drawing tools fashionable again.
