Where'd I Park My Giant Head?

Custom Vans, December 1976

Shading is Hard

Lawn Fuckers

Outies Magazine, March 1976

Bisquick - Pancake it till you make it.

Breakfast. For some people, it's the first meal of the day. And yet, for millions of Americans, they run out the door without taking the time to have a healthy, well-rounded - oh fuck that. Look at this groovy picture of pancakes from The Seventies.

By the early The Eighties the airbrush would sweep across the advertising world as the unheralded messiah of lazy, cheesy commercial art. People would love the hell out of  airbrush art, and it would later come to typify The Eighties so much, that by The Nineties, it would be (thankfully) played out, and regarded as lame as a pair of parachute pants.

In 1984, if you carried this Trapper Keeper, you were the coolest kid in homeroom. By 1990, you were a big lame, and maybe still sitting in homeroom.

An airbrush, in the hands of a really skilled airbrusher, is an amazing wondertool. Like any other media (you know: oils, pencil, etc. Not "media" as in "television" or "newspapers"), a master will make it hard to tell what they used to create the artwork. You'll hear people say things like "That's colored pencil? You're kidding me!".

So, yeah, an airbrush is not inherently stupid. It's just a tool. However, like any other annoying fad, like autotune, lens flare, or sampling, if it makes things easier to do, you can rest assured it will be wildly overused by way too many people people who use it as their shortcut to being "a artist". If they couldn't be an artist without their favorite gimmick, they're not an artist. They're a lazy fraud and a hack. There will always be a market for work like this. So, yay for lazy hackfrauds.

What's the airbrush of today? Hmm. Pick one. Computers have made it pretty easy to do nearly anything by clicking a few keys. Photoshop, for example. What's that other thing where you can replace people's faces in video and create fake revenge porn? Something like that, probably.

Okay, rant complete.

What's with the airbrush talk, anyway? This 1976 breakfast illustration looks kind of like it started with some airbrush to get started, and then maybe some watercolor or guache over that. You can see some brush strokes in the details at the edge of the plate, for example. Then there's the texture of the pancakes, which looks a lot like colored pencil. See? A good artist can work with a number of different tools and make it hard to tell how they did it.

Look at that breakfast, all shiny and glistening, like it's covered in rich, delicious vinyl. I don't know what this style would be called, but it's very Seventies. Someone should probably harvest it, pop it over an alpha channel background and save it away for a rainy day. Maybe someone will have a The Seventies-themed pancake party (god help us all)?

Hey! Look what a randomly chosen P.A.G. Graphic Blandishment and Photoshoppery Brigade staffer has done! Popped this groovy breakfast out of the ad and onto a nice transparent layer and saved it off as a PNG! Neat! Thanks, P.A.G.G.B.P.B. staffer! As for the rest of the ultranet... you're welcome! Graphic Gift incoming!!!

Click for 1600px.

Up Your Decor - There's always room for decorating!!!!!!!!!

Hey hey, my little decorizers! Did you miss me? Of course you did! Today we're going to look at some interiors with loads of personality where you might not expect it! Isn't that great! Yes! Of course it's great, you monster! Stop thinking it's not great!!!

First off, we have this adorably rustic room of some kind made of beams so roughly hewn that it's obvious the hewers didn't even have time to make them non-roughly hewn! So damn rustic! Then come the ladies of the hovel, in their identical gingham frocks, to soften up the place with that age-old hovel-softener, RUFFLES! Couldn't you just eat them up? These fashion-backward window treatments just shriek of the endearingly closed-minded world view of the old west! Why not add some of that to your house today! Ruffle that shit, man!

Maybe you think your kitchen is small? Well, shut up! This cozy country kitchen has made extra space for decorating... on the ceiling! An ordinary brain would think that there's not much room for wallpaper in here, but that brain is an idiot! Just looooook up!!!!! That's right! Ceilingpaper! Now don't you feel boring for not having a bright checkered wallpaper on your ceiling??! Of course you do! You're boring! Stop being so boring!

This groovy couple has found their spirit animal! Yellow! They covered their walls and floor with the spirit animal, and accented it with red and blue! My kingdom for a primary color scheme! Their frikkin' CLOTHES complete the color scheme! Now they have to wear those sweaters every day forever!

Ooooooo, and what's this? Mister and missus Primary have included Poitra
Kleebtp's seminal oil-on-canvas "I Am Too Tired To Paint Today, But Give
Me Money Anyway" in the room ensemble! Very tasteful!

Who doesn't want to evoke the atmosphere of old Morocco in their kitchen? No one wants to not do that!  That's who! With flooring like this, you'll want to cram all your furniture into the corner so your family can wander the boundless expanses of green and orange vinyl in search of the Maltese Falcon or something! Don't you want to join them? Don't even answer, because you do! The latticed dividers give the illusion of privacy while the latticed dividers, in delightful counterpoint, offer no privacy at all! Such counterpoint! What's in those enormous urns on the side board? Hash! Viva oo la la! Where's my fez?!?!

Roach Designs Iron-On Transfers - The road to coolness, stage 2.

Today's ad is another gem found in Whitman Comics that will help me become one of the cool kids, and inevitably be invited to sit in the back of the bus. Instead of selling me posters to enradden my groovatorium, today's ad is an opportunity to cool up one of my numerous blank undershirts, which offer no hipness in their natural state. Back in The Seventies, you could buy iron-on transfers, which could be (duh) ironed onto a t-shirt or, as is also recommended in the ad copy, a pillowcase.

These iron-ons were printed on thick vinyl, sometimes with sparkles cast right into the plastic. After twenty or so trips through the washer, the printing would often go away, leaving you with a strange silver blob on your shirt in the shape of your former bad-ass graphic. Also, they didn't breathe at all. If you took off the shirt and looked in the mirror, you could see a pink sweaty spot on your chest in the exact shape of the design. This was handy if you wanted to trace it in felt tip marker onto your skin. Mom would love that. So, the un-breathability of these things makes the idea of sleeping on a pillow with one of these graphics applied to it sounds super comfy, don't you think?

Anyway, homeroom is almost over and I haven't even chosen my super bad design yet. I need to get to work. The state of bargain-priced comic printing in 1976 was such that the little thumbnails in the ad were a challenge to make out. You can almost read some of them if you blur your eyes, like you would for a magic-eye print. This is gonna take a lot of squinting.

Design 5015 - This is clearly a design celebrating Chancellor Weslejijele, from Alexandre Dumas classic The Count of Monte Cristo. Weslejijele was the man who provided the official seal on the letter that Baron Danglars used to have Edmond Dantes falsely convicted of being a secret Bonapartist, and sentenced to life in the Chateau d'If. Treacherous and corrupt, he was a badass of the gilded age. A shirt like this will not only get me beat up by the back-of-the-bus kids, but also extra credit in Literature. No way.

Design 5006 - It's, uuh... I don't know what this is. While I do admire ambiguity, the cool kids will not like me "messing with their heads". Result: ass-kicking. No way, man.

Design 5022 - With the help of self-imposed blur-o-vision, I can just make out the shape of a guy on what looks like a ten-speed bike. It could be something to do with the Tour de France. The movie Breaking Away wouldn't make road cycling cool for another three years, and everybody knew that BMX was The Shit in '76. Also, the sissy rainbow is just begging to be punched. Veto!

Design 5049 - While I do understand the humor in ducking down and shouting "Hey! Balloons!" when there are none about, the cool kids would never get a Python reference that obscure. All they know is that goddam "spam" bit. So they'd just assume I really liked balloons... and getting punched in the nuts. Negative!

Design 5052 - Pepsi logo in a puddle of black with a plastic picnic knife stuck in it. Again with the compelling ambiguity. Again with the "stop messing with our heads". Again with the GTFO.

Design 5051 - Pretend lady tie. Hmm. This will show the cool kids that I'm a hit with the girls, but also that I'm professional, and have some disposable income. I think this may be just the ticket. Kids want to be nice to you when they think you may some day own the factory they'll inevitably work at. I have found my super cool t-shirt design! Who do I have to thank for this? Who am I sending my money to?

Gandalf again! I should have guessed. The border around the whole ad looks just like his staff. I look to the East on the dawn of the fifth day and Gandalf comes to me in my hour of lameness to bring me a super-cool t-shirt iron-on transfer! Thanks, G!

Click for big.

Lego Week Pt 2 - 404 Universal Building Set

The 404 set was just about the most exciting lego set I ever got. It was huge, it had lots of special parts, and it had a frikkin MOTOR! And since it was released in 1976, the 404 set made the black and yellow color scheme cool before Stryper made it gay.

The 404 set came with tank tracks, which almost made me weep with excitement.The first thing I did  was to build a tank using the motor and tracks. This was the set that introduced into my collection the "+" axle and wheels. You can see them on the bulldozer above. To my mind, this was the first hint of the now-super-complicated "technic" line of lego sets.

This set came with the first generation of minifigs, but hilariously, they were a torso, a legs piece, head and hat. No arms. No articulation.

Yerf and Horffdahl seem pretty happy with their hovercraft and crane. I don't think all the things in that picture could be built all at the same time. That hovercraft consumes a lot of pieces.

The instructions that came with this set definitely show their common origins with Ikea. No words and simple line drawings. I'm not sure what those colored dots represent, but it kind of looks like they would be numbers if not for the "Whatever you do, don't include words!" rule of Lego Inc.

A few months after I got the 404 set, I had a leap of understanding. I realized that if you put bigger wheels on the motor, it would go faster. So, when I picked up the 851 tractor tecnic kit, I took the giant wheels from the tractor (about 4" diameter), and put them on the motor, along with some absurdly tiny front wheels. It was a dragster that required a brisk walk to keep up with (The motor's remote was a wired unit.) When I shut it off to stop it, I sometimes put it into reverse by mistake, and the weight of the car combined with the diameter of the wheels would loudly grind the gears inside. This horrified me, so I chose to be more careful in the future with my precious motor.

I can't be sure, but I think the No.2 idea book came with the 404 kit. Maybe my folks gave it to me on the same christmas? I dunno, but those kids on the front are named Brint and Vivny. Brint grew up to be Adam Rich's stunt double on Eight is Enough. Vivny now curates the Stockholm Museum of Modern Art's new Linjer och Torg wing, where she performs her "Nude Danze in Cubizm" every Wednesday evening.