50's Advertising

While looking at the old toothpaste ad's, I realised how much I like American advertising in the 50s...and I can't really explain why, but I thought I would look at other examples so that I could possibly carry the 'style' through into my work.

I got a book from the library called All American ads: 50's. It is absolutely Huge (Amazon says the paperback version has 928...thats a lot of adverts.)

There were a lot that stuck out to me, but the main 4 examples are below.

I thought the one above was appropriate simply for the illustration of the woman, this advert is from the 1950's and look how perfect her teeth are?

Its becoming more and more evident through my research that Americans probably just think our teeth are horrible because they're so obsessed with theirs and make them look un-natural.

This ad is for a the 'Revere 33 Stereo Camera' in 1952, once again the main thing that attracted me to this was the illustration or more specifically, the facial expressions. I don't just want to copy the 'style of illustration', but I think the faces they're pulling and the colour are quite identifyable with the time period.

Of course, once I found a toothpaste ad...a 'Green Toothpaste' ad, in there, I had to have it.

Although in addition to the subject of the advert, it made me start thinking about colours. Although some of them have got 'realistic', typical skin tone colours etc. I've noticed some do have a limited colour pallette, for example - the above colgate ad appears to just use black and green. The stock also looks quite 'aged'

(PUT MOTORCYCLE AD HERE. BLACK AND RED)