Falter's tracing pad

John Falter (1910-1982) painted over 200 scenes of the American experience, which appeared as covers on the Saturday Evening Post.

In "Snowy Ambush" from 1959, a dad returns home from work to find his kids waiting for him, half-hidden in trenches of snow.

It's natural to assume that Falter found this idea readymade somewhere, but he had to construct it first in his imagination using a tracing pad.


Here is how another idea looked at sketch stage. A group of planners hold up a drawing for a highway cutting through a hill. Surveyors drive in stakes in the background. The old farmhouse is in the way.

The figures are drawn very simply, with very little detail. Falter is not hiring models yet.


He places another page of tracing paper over the first sketch. Falter changes his mind and explores another concept. He's still working from his imagination. The old house changes to a one-room school. The planners hold up a drawing of a new district school.


For the final cover, he returns to his original concept of the new highway threatening the house.

The final painting is not as successful as "Snowy Ambush." Perhaps the problem is that the characters aren't developed, so it's hard to tell how Falter feels about the situation. Also, he accurately shows the engineers using a blueprint, but blueprints don't read quickly enough to make immediate sense on a cover.

All these problems need to be solved at the tracing pad stage. It's worth spending tireless effort on the early sketch stages, because no amount of rendering will fix a problem that lurks on the tracing pad.
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Falter's widow donated his studies to the collection of the Nebraska State Historical Society , along with many objects and furnishings from his studio.

Addendum: I posed the question:
"I was wondering how Rockwell would have approached this whole situation. I imagine he would have focused on the plight of the property owner whose place has been condemned by eminent domain. That could have been done with poignant humor and sympathy." 

....and Matthew Mattin suggested this example, which I had forgotten about. Thanks, Matthew!

Wikipedia on John Philip Falter