Summer 2022
Harry’s airbrush
Sidebar from ‘Captain airbrush’ by Mike Dempsey
Sidebar from ‘Captain airbrush’, a profile of Harry Willock by Mike Dempsey.
To many, the term ‘airbrush’ is firmly linked to a tool in Photoshop. But from the 1930s to the 70s it was an important physical tool used in many commercial art studios. Slightly bigger than a fountain pen, the airbrush is a handheld device with a tube through which a fast-moving flow of compressed air is mixed with water-based coloured ink or paint drawn from a reservoir usually on the top of the tool. A finger-controlled pressure button allows the colour to spray through a small adjustable nozzle onto a surface, be it a photograph, an artboard or another material.
It is a very exacting device and requires a great deal of skill and dexterity to produce the complex, multi-coloured work Harry Willock achieved with Alan Aldridge. As each colour is applied, other areas have to be masked off with special film (Frisket film) to avoid tainting colours that have already been established.
Detail from a image by Alan Aldridge airbrushed by Harry Willock for The Beatles Illustrated Lyrics (1969).
During the USSR’s Stalinist regime, anyone who had fallen out of favour would be physically removed from official Communist Party photographs – this was often undertaken using an airbrush. Publishers of porn magazines also employed the skills of airbrush retouchers to mask or remove genitalia from photographs, to adhere to obscenity laws. The sci-fi artist H. R. Giger used the airbrush to great effect in his ominous creatures, which caught the eye of film director Ridley Scott, who engaged Giger to create the nightmarish beast in Alien (1979).
These days, the make-up industry uses the airbrush to spray directly onto the skin of models to enhance their looks before a photoshoot. And there is a big market for custom-decorated cars, motorcycles, skateboards and surfboards. Airbrushes are still manufactured in the UK, but much of the work these days for print and movies is done using digital tools, which make the process faster, more flexible and infinitely changeable.
Mike Dempsey, graphic designer, writer, blogger, broadcaster, London and Dorset
First published in Eye no. 103 vol. 26, 2022
Read ‘Captain airbrush’, Mike Dempsey’s profile of Harry Willock in Eye 103. Portrait: Philip Sayer.
Eye is the world’s most beautiful and collectable graphic design journal, published for professional designers, students and anyone interested in critical, informed writing about graphic design and visual culture. It is available from all good design bookshops and online at the Eye shop, where you can buy subscriptions and single issues.