Keeping Warm and Biscuits Lefevre Utile
Keeping Warm and Biscuits Lefevre Utile is a retouched mixed art piece that combines American Illustrator Gil Elvgren (1914 – 1980) Pin Up Girl artwork with that of the Art Nouveau Master Alphonse Mucha (1860 – 1939) early 19th century advertisement; with an additional simple fractal digital art combination intermediary piece of my own creation.
The pin up girl is wearing pink lingerie, with matching colored garter belts and sheer tan stocking; and is wrapped in a black mink jacket and is wearing black strap high heel shoes.
Behind her is my digital and fractal mix circular disc star flare and behind that the art nouveau Biscuits artwork with its rich deep warm color tones and flowing form that is enhanced with an 3D looking aqua border.
I also added additional shadows to the pin up girl to give her a fuller look and to make her stand out as a physical object that is floating on top of the background painting.
This is a retouched digital art old masters reproduction of a public domain image.
Info Below Derived From Wikipedia.org
Gil Elvgren
Gillette A. Elvgren was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, and attended University High School. After graduation, he began studying art at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.
He later moved to Chicago to study at the American Academy of Art, and graduated from the Academy during the great depression, at the age of twenty-two.
After graduation Elvgren joined the stable of artists at Stevens and Gross, Chicago’s most prestigious advertising agency, and became a protégé of the artist Haddon Sundblom.
In 1937, Gil began painting calendar pin-ups for Louis F. Dow, one of America’s leading publishing companies, during which time he created about 60 pin-up girl works on 22″ × 28″ canvas and distinguished them by a printed signature.
Many of his pin-ups were reproduced as nose art on military aircraft during World War II; and it was around this time in 1944, that Elvgren was approached by the Brown and Bigelow Publishing Company; a firm that still dominates the field in producing calendars, advertising specialties and promotional merchandise.
The next year from 1945 until 1972, Elvgren was associated with the Brown & Bigelow publishing company, and began working with 24 inch by 30 inch canvases, a format that he would use for the next 30 years, and signed his work in cursive.
Elvgren was a commercial success. He lived in various locations, and was active from the 1930s to the 1970s. In 1951 he began painting in a studio in his home, then in Winnetka, Illinois, using an assistant to set up lighting, build props and scenes, photograph sets, and prepare his paints.
His clients included well known companies like Brown and Bigelow, Coca-Cola, General Electric and the Sealy Mattress Company, to name a few. In addition, during the 1940s and 1950s he illustrated stories for a host of magazines, such as The Saturday Evening Post and Good Housekeeping.
Among the models and hollywood legends Elvgren painted during his career included Myrna Hansen, Donna Reed, Barbara Hale, Arlene Dahl, Lola Albright and Kim Novak.
Alphonse Mucha
Alfons Maria Mucha July 24, 1860 – July 14, 1939), was known internationally as Alphonse Mucha. He was a prominent Czech painter, illustrator and graphic artist, living in Paris during the Art Nouveau period, and is best known for his distinctly stylized and decorative theatrical posters, particularly those of Sarah Bernhardt.
He produced illustrations, advertisements, decorative panels, and designs, which became among the best-known images of the period.
In the second part of his career, at the age of 43, he returned to his homeland of Bohemia-Moravia region in Austria and devoted himself to painting a series of twenty monumental canvases known as The Slav Epic, depicting the history of all the Slavic peoples of the world, which he painted between 1912 and 1926.
In 1928, on the 10th anniversary of the independence of Czechoslovakia, he presented the series to the Czech nation. He considered it his most important work. It is now on display in Prague.
