Rabbit Yarn

THE angora rabbits owned by Mrs. Paul Venne of Penacook, New Hampshire work for their keep. They provide soft fur which she plucks instead of shears to prevent it from matting. This she spins into yarn and knits into such serviceable items as bonnets, berets, gloves and sweaters. And the bunnies don’t seem to mind a bit.

Deer Hunts Elephants

LITTLE-game hunter on a big scale is I Jack Deer, 55-year-old New York businessman. He has a collection of over 1,400 miniature elephants, all with upturned trunks. They are made of ivory, china and glass gathered from all countries of the world. His most prized is one owned by the late Flo Ziegfeld, also a collector.

Details of the dioramas may be found here as well as a detailed biography.

view additional pages

MURDER IS HER HOBBY

A gentle 77-year-old. dowager is New England’s top criminologist and the creator of Harvard’s famous “nutshell studies” of unexplained death.

By John N. Makris

MRS. FRANCES LEE, who is a captain in the New Hampshire State Police and the only woman in the United States to hold such an active rank, has become, as a result of an unusual and non-paying hobby, a pioneer in the application of medical science to crime detection.

Her amazing series of model crime settings, which Mrs. Lee builds with the aid of a carpenter at her Littleton, N. H., estate, are housed in a special room at Harvard University’s Department of Legal Medicine, which she founded and endowed and which is the first and only one of its kind in North America.

Resembling shadow boxes, the models are built into the walls and are illuminated under glass in the darkened room. Above each model is furnished such general information as the “investiga- tor” would probably obtain before determining the nature of death. Read the rest of this entry »

view additional pages

Make A Bust Of Yourself!

Sculpture is easy with this new European technique. All you need to know is how to take a good photograph.

ALL you need to be an expert sculptor these days is a good camera—or rather a pair of cameras!

With a new technique recently devised in Switzerland, it now is possible to make amazingly accurate sculptured likenesses of yourself and your friends simply by snapping a photograph, superimposing the image on a mound of clay, and then whittling it down to size. Here’s the way it’s done: Two cameras are placed side-by-side as shown in the illustration, with the person whose image is to be created seated in focus before the lens. Alongside the two cameras is a machine which projects a screen on the model’s face. Read the rest of this entry »

Ike Likes Art
GENERAL Dwight Eisenhower has been a very busy man. First it was the Army, then Columbia University, then SHAPE and now the White House could be just around the corner. A man couldn’t do the jobs Ike has done without having some means of relaxation. With Ike it’s art. When the whistle blows at the end of a tough day, the General unlimbers his art tools and makes like Rembrandt. And he does pretty well, too. One of his early pieces, a painting of an Indian head, sold for $2,600. His oils stole the show at Columbia art exhibit.

view additional pages

How a Sign is Painted

A water-color drawing, scaled one inch to the foot, is squared off by the pictorial painter for his own guidance in putting such outsize art work on a board with raw paint. This is shown below, overlaid on an outline sketch of picture and lettering that is keyed to serve as a color chart.
Read the rest of this entry »

THERE’S MONEY TODAY IN ART

THIS is the day of the artist. His skill is sought wherever design and color are important factors in the sale of merchandise.

Furniture, rugs, wall hangings, household utensils, wearing apparel, jewelry, art gifts, lamps, automobiles — nearly everything sold today depends, on design and color to attract the eye of the purchaser. Drawings for advertisements in newspapers, magazines, catalogs, folders, posters, display cards and many other media call for the skill of the modern artist. Consider the number of drawings in this magazine alone! Art is a necessity in modern business. Read the rest of this entry »

view additional pages

They Chisel Plastic

Modern sculptors can carve light and shadow into their work with a thrilling new man-made material.

LOT’S wife was turned into a pillar of salt in the Bible but British sculptor Arthur Fleischmann has chipped her out of the biggest block of Perspex ever made. Perspex is a British plastic similar to Plexiglas or Lucite. With Perspex a sculptor can “sculpture in glass.” A Dubliner named Maxwell Moffet drills beautiful marine animals into plate Perspex; properly lighted, his creatures swim brilliantly in a sea of shadow.

‘Moving Painting’ Machine May Revolutionize Future Art

An INVENTION which may foreshadow a new era in the plastic field of art has recently been developed by Alexander Archipenko, noted exponent of modernistic motif in sculpture and painting.

The invention is literally a “moving painting,” being somewhat similar to motion pictures in that it is capable of revealing on its faces many varied designs and paintings, constantly moving, and each one a perfect image. Read the rest of this entry »

He Sculpts Rail Spikes

Discarded railroad spikes are turned into iron cartoons by Howard Munce, a New York art director who finds his raw material along the roadbed of the railroad near his Connecticut home.

He uses a handsaw, file, welding torch, forge and anvil to fashion amusing figures that also have merit as pieces of sculpture.
Read the rest of this entry »

view additional pages

TIN-FOIL SCULPTURE

How One Man Makes Good Use of a Common Wrapping Material That Most of Us Throw Away

THIRTY years ago, as a child, Paul E. Tichon began collecting scraps of tin foil. He still does. In the meantime, every scrap he could lay his hands on he has converted into hundreds of delicately hand-wrought pieces of “sculpture,” some of which are illustrated on these pages.
Read the rest of this entry »

view additional pages

Is Your Mascot Missing?

The passion for authenticity among classic car owners means money in the bank to Clairmonte.

Don Clairmonte of New York City’s Greenwich Village is a one-time car salesman who turned sculptor. One of his specialties is restoring, reproducing and creating mascots to ride up front on rejuvenated classics and custom jobs. His copies are chrome or nickel-plated bronze castings, and there’s no way of telling them from the real McCoy.
Read the rest of this entry »

Maybe I should change the name of the category to YDI…

view additional pages

They Made It From You-Do-It

The Prices’ Trinkit, a jewelry enameling kit, turned them into big-time hobby makers.

By Phil Hirsch

BILL and Barbara Price were in a rut.

Both of them had been department store buyers for three years. Now, in the spring of 1953, their jobs were beginning to pall. They wanted something a little more exciting to do.

Their bank account amounted to $3,500. By investing the money in a business, Bill and Barbara could buy all the excitement they wanted. But instead, they gambled their savings on a trip to Europe, in the hope that the trip would produce a money-making idea. Read the rest of this entry »