Leyendecker Study

Last night I was trying to kill some time so I went to a Borders book store. I stumbled across the book J.C. Leyendecker and literally said "Holy shit!" out loud upon seeing it. (This caused a couple of the customers to turn their heads quickly). The cause for excitement was due to the fact that I have literally been looking and waiting for a book like this to come out for the last 5 years. Every time I ever went to a Borders or Barnes & Noble or Half Price Book, or any book store for that matter, I always tried to find a book dealing just with the work of Leyendecker. I got so desperate at one point I even went to Amazon.com and saw that there was a book about Leyendecker created in the 70's and that it was out of print. There was also a 46 page out of print poster book created in the 90's. I was always bummed out though because I felt that such a prolific illustrator deserved a thick, thick book. ( also, if you know your alphabet, P follows L very closely. Imagine my disgust every time I saw there were no Leyendecker books, but there were literally 15 books on Pollock. Really? 15 books about that ass-clown?)

Well, the wait is over. Here's a 256 page book filled with his beautiful images. Finally.

There is a painting in the book of an early 1900's pilot that I really dug, so I did a charcoal sketch of it.