John Abbot Nez (50's Style Illustrator)

John Abbot Nez, is a children's illustrator, who creates pieces that resemble the 1950's style of children's illustration for books and print. He interestingly tries to combine the 1950's retro style, with a digital style. He often looks at what he calls 'amazing' artists of the 1950's, whose style of work seems to fit in the modern era.

I place a quote from his site below, that I want to detail word for word, as it is a very interesting point in my opinion, that he gives.

"I was looking through magazines from the 1950's and found some amazing samples of Alice and Martin Provensen's illustration work from the 1950's.  It still looks very contemporary.  Maybe that's because 1950's design seems so similar to our own decade... or maybe it's just a timeless classic.  Of course they didn't get to use digital tools to embellish their amazing designs, but I guess their work will last the ages."

The fact that he claims 1950's illustrations are similar to illustrations styles in this era, raises a good point. Since hearing this, I have realised this too, the amount of similarities you can see between these two different eras are striking. I will show this below, with examples to back my argument up.

(1950's children's illustration)
http://media-cache-ec0.pinimg.com/236x/a2/37/1a/a2371a91a3209d3373fdd524ad3a7243.jpg < image reference at this link.



(2010 children's illustration)
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2010/11/04/best-2-slide.jpg < image reference at this link.

As you can see in these comparison images blow, the top one is from the 50's, and the bottom one is from the 2010 era. These two images are very similar, in terms of style, and technique. You can see obvious similarities in such things as the rosy cheeks, the colour and the simple textures.

His art style is based on a pen brush line, that is drawn onto textured watercolour paper. He tries to make his colours bright and bold, which are staples in the 1950's illustration themed style. He then combines traditional with the digital format, and adds texture and pattern on adobe photoshop.

http://www.childrensillustrators.com/illustrator-details/JohnNez/id=1504/slideshow/pag=11/ < image reference at this link.

Here is an example of John's illustrations. In this case, of two cats. This shows his 50's influenced artwork style, and how he uses texture, colour and lines to do this well.

For his work he uses the following software packages of photoshop, Indesign, Acrobat, Illustrator and GoLive, and with a mac pro desktop computer and a wacom tablet, a digital camera, two desktop cinema displays for a wide canvas when drawing. These types of equipment seem to be standard for each illustrator that I research, most of this equipment also accounts for my own personal ventures as an artist.

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http://www.childrensillustrators.com/illustrator-details/JohnNez/id=1504/portfolio/ < a link to where I got the information on him, and also a link to his online portfolio.





Thomas.