I don’t know how I came across these posters, but they’re too
good to keep to myself. All of them date back to the Great
Depression and give a glimpse of American culture in the ’30s
and ’40s. More than that, they’re also good examples of how
artists used specific techniques to overcome the limitations of
their medium. All of these posters were made by either
silkscreen, lithograph, or woodcut, and as such were limited in
color and detail—and yet many of them are so well done you’d
never realize it. This Pennsylvania poster is made with only one
color, I believe (or one plus black) by using different values
of blue from a single blue ink. You can see how the artist made
the most of it by creating texture and depth through his use of
line quality. In contrast, the next poster uses at least three
colors, and drew on pointillist methods to create both the
texture of the plowed earth and the glow of the morning sky. And
when the subject matter threatened to be dull, a common method
back then (and still today, as