Happy April, No Fooling

Sports & Summer Fashions, June 1930. Illustration by Eduardo Benito.Happy April! One day late! That was my little April Fool’s joke … Actually I couldn’t tear myself away from the drawing board to go to the computer – I am feeling so retro these days, making art the traditional way.

I do like the blithe and airy mood of this illustration by the Spaniard Eduardo Benito, the April page on my Vogue calendar. This looks like it has been painted in gouache, in a very painterly and relaxed style.

I remember learning how to use this medium at TAFE (an intermediary tertiary college in between high school and art college), and owing to our lecturer’s obsession with flat planes of colour, it was also a medium difficult to master. Apparently, the only way to paint with gouache was in a very graphic style of simple shapes and flat areas of colour – not only flat in terms of no shading (or perhaps, imperceptibly graduating colour was allowed), but NO brushmarks were permitted to be visible. We were marked on that. I hated it.

So this Benito illustration is quite liberating. It perfectly suits the carefree pastime of running elegantly (jumper insouciantly tossed around your shoulders) beside your lissom greyhound, tossing a ball.

Have a lovely and carefree month Snapettes.