Old School – ink drawing news graphic with tape rules and zipatone.
Barbara Bose
If only there was a ‘shift+control+alt+delete’ for real life. We could instantly undo our mistakes, misspeaks and misdirections. We could airbrush away the annoying parts, blur our wrinkles, softly clone or cut and paste better images on top of the ugly ones. Marketers and politicians use these Photoshop-like tools for the images they want us to believe and then we wonder why real life seems so imperfect.
In the Olden Days of the newspaper industry in the mid 1980s,the Boston Herald art department where I worked was located in the middle of the newsroom, in the heart of the action. Part of my job was to retouch photographs with an airbrush or gray scale guache, as every news photo was retouched back in those days. Glossy black and white photos were passed through the hands of the art department to be judged for reproduction clarity. Backgrounds were simplified, wrinkles in clothing, faces and hairdos were smoothed and beautified. Complicated backgrounds and annoying people were painted over. Simplicity ruled when grayscale images were 65 gritty dots per inch.
By the late ’80s, I had moved to Florida and got a job as an illustrator at The Palm Beach Post. The busy art department got a Macintosh SE for news graphics, and I fell in love. I bought my own SE for $4,000, the price of a car in those days.
Once Photoshop came along, my T-square, pots of gray gauche, ink, airbrush and waxy pencils went into a drawer forever. No more resizing a photo without algebra and a plastic ratio tool, no more T-square and tape, wobbly drafting desk, too tall stools, clogged rapidographs, tedious friskets, dull X-acto blades, ripped amberlith, clogged waxers, chipped burnishers, over- or under-exposed stats, expensive stat paper, huge stat cameras, killer stat chemistry or icky scrubbing trays. No more specking type, font catalogs, typesetting equipment, rush deliveries or horizontal drawers full of Letraset and artboards either. And no more companies making those things.
Eventually there would be no more paste-up department and no busy art department at all.
