Nostalgia, Bleeding and Cutting

When I worked as a commercial illustrator, I was not known by any one particular style, and so I developed a range of styles, and that kept me busy.

click to enlarge   |   © Mark D. Ruffner, 1983

This was a full-page newspaper ad I illustrated one Christmas for a local shopping center. For the line art I developed a technique of drawing on thick, absorbent paper with a felt-tip marker. The felt-tip marker would bleed, but slowly so, allowing me to control the line's "nubbiness." Note how I put my initials on the rocking horse's rear, where a brand would be!

The art director for this job was my good friend John Atkinson, with whom I worked on many fun projects — he came up with the concept (and I've mentioned him before, here). Together we spent one evening cutting amberlith overlays for each color.

George Rorick On Using Amberlith   |   www.channels.com/episodes/15488588

This job was done before the days of the computer, so each individual color would be indicated on an amberlith overlay.

Amberlith is a sheet of acetate that is covered with an orange gel that is both semi-transparent and peelable. The amberlith is placed over the artwork, and the areas for one particular color are cut with an exacto blade so that the amberlith covers those areas, and all the rest is peeled away. The step is repeated for each color, and then registration marks are put on each acetate so that all the colors register at printing time.

Producing full-color ads this way was a tedious job, and I sometimes created ads that had more than 20 color overlays! The Christmas ad above required only five.

While this process is now very much outdated in the digital world, it was the norm in newspaper work well into the 1990s.
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