Sometimes I remember how different things used to be when I first started working in a professional design studio, 20 years ago, and I have the impression that if the illustrators and designers from those days would have had the opportunity of foresee how technology would change our work we would have thought it was all science-fiction.
In effect, in the 80’s things were pretty different from today. We used to work with translucent screens with fluorescent tubes installed below our boards in order to trace. In the summer they would get so hot that they would turn the studio into something similar to a nudist beach. As soon as the temperature would rise the clothes would drop. It had nothing to do with the heat from our modern computers, believe me. Sometimes an unexpected scream would make all the ink pots fall in the studio. It would come from someone who carelessly laid his arm upon a hot spot on the table.
On top of the board we used transparent acetate sheets with a grid. We would fix them with sticking tape to the board and use them as the modern Photoshop guides and rulers, but these ones were not movable. With the daily use of the cutter they used to end up full of rips so we had to change them every week. Very often the acrylic glass board would also end up full of rips. In fact, most of the methods and tools that of the designers were from the architect and draftsmen’s professions. We used to work with couché paper (a paper with a satin texture), which was really uncomfortable and unpleasant for pencil drawing because of it’s texture.
Once the pencil drawing was done, no vectorial work here of course, we used to re-draw it with rotring. The rotring was another draftsmen’s tool, which would make us spend more time cleaning than actually drawing. Very often the daily work was more similar to the life of a mariner that an artist, cleaning and checking out our tools constantly. Of course, when the rotring was not clean enough the ink would get dry in the inside and would provoke one of the most scary things in our job: a spot. To keep the famous Murphy’s law alive, the spots would always appear when the work was almost done. Of course, if you got a spot, sometimes you could use a cutter to scratch the surface of the paper and remove the ink. That’s the reason why we used couché paper. You could tell when somebody in the studio had one of these unpleasant accidents because of the sudden changes of humor and use of expletives. This still happens today in the computer world, when an application like Photoshop closes unexpectedly and one stupidly loses his unsaved work. Technology has changed but not the designers.
Another peculiarity from our work is that the drawings needed to be done in reverse, I mean like a mirror. This was a requirement of the technique because later the drawings were photographed to make a photolithograph. Personally, this was not a problem for me because I had been doing engraving art for a few years and this would also require drawing in reverse. Anyhow, I must recognize that more than once I was absent-minded and did the work in the right direction and was obligated to do it all over again. On such occasions, I would also have sudden changes of humor and use expletives myself.
After drawing in ink, the original work would pass to a room where a gigantic machine to photograph the photolithographs was placed. The photolithographs were first done on black film, a negative. These negatives would come back to the designer board to be retouched to remove undesired spots from dust specks and other crap. We had to cover the spots with a special painting and then send them back to get the positive, just like in a photography studio. Then we had to get the film dry with a hairdryer and once again fix it from undesired spots or defects by removing the black ink with a cutter. When all of the photolithographs were ready, we started the layout work placing every little film piece as a puzzle over the grid. We would fix the pieces with sticking tape, taking care of placing them right so they wouldn’t provoke undesired lines in the final printing.
Actually this reminds me a lot to the old editing techniques in the recording studios. Because my personal relation with the world of music and production, I had to learn these old techniques in a recording studio, sticking little pieces of audio tape together. It is amazing when you think some of the most legendary albums from the Beatles, David Bowie and Yes were produced with this technque, getting little pieces of tape stuck together one after the other. Nothing to do with Pro Tools, nothing to do with Photoshop.
An illustration of mine from 1987 featuring both gradient techniques: the airbrush in the dawning sky and tooth brush in the stars.
When the project would require several inks the work was basically the same but multiplied by the number of layers for each color. Also during the 80’s, the illustrators discovered an amazing tool: the airbrush. My generation grew up staring at those wonderful album covers by Roger Dean and Mouse & Kelly, and the vision of those perfect gradients was just unbelievable. When I was a teenager I was in an exhibition of a reputed Spanish children’s illustrator called Jose Ramon Sanchez who used this tool and I ran into him to ask him how the hell he would get such perfect gradients. At the time I didn’t know about the aircraft. I guess that instead of telling a 13 year old kid to spend some $1500 in such a expensive device, the man told me he used to paint them with a tooth brush. During the next week I ruined absolutely every tooth brush at home and my mother was wondering why the new tooth paste tasted like painting. You may imagine how primitive this technique was, rubbing the brush hair with the thumb and spitting acrylic painting like a fair bb gun. Nothing to do with the Photoshop gradients, of course. I later got to use a professional airbrush that a an artist friend of mine bought. It was an amazing time and our works were irresistibly crowded by gradient skies.
The work system is similar to the one today, just harder. You had to fix transparent film to the drawing and cut the lines with a cutter in order to remove the part you needed to airbrush, similar to the Photoshop masks. The airbrush was another instrument that required a lot of pampering and cleaning. When you wouldn’t, the acrylic painting would get dry around the inner needle of the gun and would provoke the damned spits. I remember once one of this bloody spits made me jump and I dropped the water pot with the airbrush hose. The next second absolutely all of the open painting cans in the board kept falling over one by one like domino pieces. I guess that was the day I started thinking about the consequences of each action in the universe.
For the text placement, it was nothing like today’s text editors of course. It is hard to believe that just 20 years ago we were using such primitive techniques. Letraset was all we knew about. I remember we used to go to these offices in downtown Madrid where you could by all sort of fonts. They had these huge drawers full of boxes with Letraset papers, and we used to pick them from catalogue books that we had. It was beautiful experience to look at all those collections of fonts. Letraset was a paper to transfer fonts, each transfer paper would give you a set of letters with the alphabet on the same font. I remember some letters, such as the S and A would run out too fast. When the studio was short of transfer papers we would have to make Frankenstein letters in a rush to get the work done using different letters. The transfer paper would work by rubbing the letters on the couché paper with a tool called a "burnisher". Very often the letters would break, especially the smaller ones, and we would have to fix them with rotring now and again. To remove the letters we would use the same technique of scratching the couché paper. Placing letters on paper is one of these things I definitely don’t miss from the old days and I wouldn’t trade my 30 seconds of editing text to that 30 minutes.
Before Photoshop, Illustrator and the computers, the life of the designer used to be pretty different, but maybe is not as much better as it seems. We have gained in terms of time, risk of losing work (if we keep a good backup), and possibilities of combining and experimenting with our work, especially when it’s about duplicating, combining and resizing layers. Never the less, for those who started before Photoshop and Machintosh, we miss lots of things from the old times and we wait for the time to come when the analog feeling is recovered from technology. Not for a better result, not for imitation of the analog world, but for a more pleasurable and sensitive work.
The next time I will talk about the limitations of digital technology for the analog artists.
