{"id":12667,"date":"2012-11-30T01:20:22","date_gmt":"2012-11-30T01:20:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/?p=12667"},"modified":"2012-11-30T01:20:22","modified_gmt":"2012-11-30T01:20:22","slug":"how-it-works","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/2012\/11\/30\/how-it-works\/","title":{"rendered":"How It Works"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"hiw1.jpg\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Yes, it’s all happening this month… Unlike other work that’s surfaced recently the cover art for issue 41 of How It Works<\/em> magazine<\/a> was completed less than a month ago. Headlines obscure much of the artwork but the picture is also run full-page inside, something I wasn’t expecting. How It Works<\/em> has major newsstand distribution so people in the UK may see this on shelves in newsagents and supermarkets throughout December.<\/p>\n

The theme is the Industrial Revolution but the brief was for something similar to a couple of my recent steampunk illustrations, with a request for a colour scheme like that used for the Bookman Histories<\/em> cover<\/a>. The main visual requirement was the train looming out of the picture. I thought this wouldn’t be a problem, I have the old Dover Publications’ Transportation<\/em> book which features many copyright-free engravings of trains, in addition to other books and source material downloaded from the Internet Archive. One of these would be sure to have a decent front elevation of a steam locomotive, right? Wrong. When you start looking for pictures of locomotives you quickly find that 99% of them show the machines from the side or from an angle, as on the Bookman<\/em> cover. I downloaded three entire books of over 500-pages each from the Internet Archive, fantastic volumes in themselves, especially Modern Locomotive Construction<\/em><\/a> (1892) which contains meticulous descriptions of every last part of a steam locomotive, down to the smallest screw. But none of their drawings were usable.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"hiw3.jpg\"<\/p>\n

Eventually, and with time ebbing away, I decided to abandon the search for an engraved depiction and create something from scratch using this engineering drawing as the starting point. The picture below is one of the intermediary drafts before the height of the engine was reduced and a lamp added. The cattle-catcher thing at the front\u2014which book research had told me is called “a pilot”\u2014also had its perspective adjusted. Train enthusiasts will complain that the end result doesn’t correspond to any engine ever built but that’s the way things go sometimes in illustration.<\/p>\n

\"hiw4.jpg\"<\/p>\n

\"hiw2.jpg\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Previously on { feuilleton }
\n\u2022 The Bookman Histories<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yes, it’s all happening this month… Unlike other work that’s surfaced recently the cover art for issue 41 of How It Works magazine was completed less than a month ago. Headlines obscure much of the artwork but the picture is also run full-page inside, something I wasn’t expecting. How It Works has major newsstand distribution … Continue reading “How It Works”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2,42,1029,43,15,23],"tags":[4326,249],"class_list":["post-12667","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","category-books","category-collage","category-magazines","category-technology","category-work","tag-how-it-works-magazine","tag-steampunk"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pq7rV-3ij","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12667","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12667"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12667\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12667"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12667"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12667"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}