Hollywood Glamour Portraits
And Why They're a Useful Study
This is the Rocketeer. Today, I’m going to talk to you about Hollywood Glamour art, a style seen on Hollywood fan magazines during their heyday of the 1920’s and ‘30’s. Often, these pieces were created in chalk pastel, a lovely and sensitive medium. I find it interesting how often pastel was used for cover art during the period from about World War I until 1940-ish. Pastel is a relatively rare illustrative medium today. I was eager to try it for myself but quickly discovered that the chalk dust was irritating my lungs. So I switched to oil pastels, which are not all that different from fine art crayons. To date, I’ve done about a dozen pieces in oil pastels and have learned a lot about blending and surfaces. I’m still considering their potential for book cover art.
The piece above is my newest, just completed a few days ago. It illustrates a character in the book I’m writing at the moment. The piece may, or may not, make it into the book. But I like it as it captures her perfectly. A bit later in this post I’ll show you the original magazine cover which inspired my piece and explain a bit little more about the process.
Picture Play, Photoplay, Motion Picture, Movie Classic, and Film Play were but a few of the popular fan magazines at the time. The cover generally showed head portraits of starlets, although male stars were also seen less frequently. All the A-list fan magazines used top-notch portrait illustrators such as: Modest Stein, Earle Christy, Emil Flohri, Henry Clive, Marland Stone, Rolf Armstrong, and Zoe Mozart. Every month you could see a glittering star like Greta Garbo, Kathryn Hepburn, Constance Bennett, Lillian Gish, Tyrone Power, or Rudolph Valentino smiling out at you from the cover. And these were not just portraits, either. No sir! They were glamour portraits! Really beautiful works of art highlighting the brightest stars in the Hollywood firmament. Here are some examples.
I have been studying some of the techniques used by these superstar Hollywood glamour painters in the interest of upping my own artistic game. You can learn a lot by doing this—about the color palettes, for instance, or how the skin tones were handled, and so forth. I continue to experiment with surfaces for my oil pastels, seeking the best one for my needs. I truly enjoy portraiture work, whether that be people or animals, and studying these “Hollywood heads” has been a real joy for me.
Although I had intended to copy this lovely Marland Stone cover illustrating Constance Bennett precisely, while painting my mind was firmly set on a character from one of my upcoming books. Unconsciously, I changed the work to better suit that character. No matter who inspired what, I’m pleased with the piece. It has energy and movement and shows the beauty and spunk expressed this particular character. So, a success!
I’ll continue my journey with oil pastels. My next piece will have a man as its subject. But who, I have not yet decided.
This is the Rocketeer signing off for today.
Your illustrations are great. Keep up the good work. I like your more painterly art on this one! Jonathan Jensen