Prior to the emergence and popularity of image libraries and stock photo agencies, The Fairburn System of Visual References was considered the holy grail of visual reference material for artists of the day. Produced in 3 volume sets of human figures, faces and heads, figures and hands, they were an indispensible resource for the art director and commercial artist who relied on the photo references to hand render people—usually with Magic Markers—for conceptual storyboards and ad campaigns. Just like rubber cement and presstype, the Fairburn System was considered an essential tool for "pitching" clients throughout the 1970s and 80s, and most every...
Hello, my name is…Help for the linguistically challenged
Aleksandr Isayevich SolzhenitsynGrowing up in Brooklyn in the 1960's has had its advantages for sure but one of the major side effects are the linguistic challenges one faces as they head into the world with a Brooklyn accent. There remain some author's names to this day I have trouble pronouncing.Enter TeachingBooks.com's Author Pronunciation Guide.Here you can can listen to brief recordings of authors and illustrators introducing themselves. Each begins with "Hello my name is..." There are hundreds of author's and illustrators in the database.In addition to learning "correct pronunciations of hard-to-pronounce names" one also gets to hear the authors reveal...
The Sex Lives of Civil War Soldiers
Johnny Reb and Billy Yank had a secret life, one that they and their families tried to hide from posterity and Ken Burns.They largely succeeded. Most men left no record of their sexual activities, or if they did, their survivors expurgated or expunged the record through destruction; the reality was a bit too seamy for pure sensibilities, legacies needed to be protected. Reports of wild times and venereal disease were not likely to be appreciated by descendants.Thus the Civil, our most holy, War, ennobled at the time and forevermore as a moral cause by both sides, has been stripped of...