Saturday, March 15, 2008

'58 Chevrolet station Wagon Newspaper Ad

V8 WITH VITAMINS !
Sorry about the quality of the reproduction. Many of the ads in this blog came from a couple of old boxes of glass slides given to me by my boss Jim Hastings many years ago. Some I have not been able to transfer at all. This is worth looking at for the quality of the illustration. Another great piece of work for Chevrolet. I can't say enough about what this kind of art meant to Chevy advertising. On occasion J. Walter Thompson, the Ford ad agency, would hire one of our artists to do a newspaper ad illustration and it always turned out to look like and be mistaken for a Chevy ad. The illustrations all used a "line art"technique that worked beautifully in newspapers of the day. The main part of the illustration was done with pen and ink and there was no place for a single mistake. Every detail was as accurate as each piece of type in the body copy. When the line drawing was finished it was made into a clear cell and a blue print on a sheet of illustration board. The halftone part of the illustration was then painted on to the board using the blue print as a guide. The cell with the line drawing was fastened to the board so that the illustration could now be viewed the way it would be seen in the newspaper with both the line drawing and the halftone. Newspapers back then were nothing like they are today. When the press was running it tended to wobble all over the place. Our line art would keep the picture of our Chevy looking good no mater what. This was even more important when we began to use a second color in the ads.

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