A fantastic document for many reasons: a portrait of the illustration industry circa 1952, an instructional book, and one of only a few monographs on this mid-century illustrator.

John Clymer created covers for the Saturday Evening Post and numerous illustrations for True, American Locomotive, and national advertising campaigns.

This book opens with "The Story of John Clymer" followed by "How I Work" with dozens of examples and step-by-step demonstrations.

Foreword:

We take special pride in presenting the life story of John Clymer, for his early art studies were with Federal Schools, Inc., a name which we later changed to Art Instruction, Inc. The fires of his talent and ambition burned so deeply, that this early urge to study art carried him further with several masters. with these he studied and perfected the art that later reached its maturity and firmly placed John Clymer's name among the Masters of American Illustrating.

In these pages, he shows, through the medium of words, sketches, studies and paintings, how his masterful work is accomplished. Truly, the life and work of this Master Artist should be an inspiration to every aspiring artist in this broad land. John Clymer knew what he wanted his life work to be and everything he did was bent toward that one goal. That he accomplished his purpose was not a miracle, but the result of persistent application. It is the main purpose of this book to show how this can be done and how it was done. Given the means, it is not too difficult to find the way.

The Technique of John Clymer is but one of a series of MASTER ARTIST TEXTS especially prepared for us by present day MASTER ARTISTS. They are designed principally for the more advanced art student, leaving the fundamentals of drawing to be covered in basic texts of our course. However, these MASTER ARTIST books do demonstrate the purpose of our early basic training and for this reason the first book of this series is given the student early in the course. Other MASTER ARTIST TEXTS follow as the student progresses.

Regular lesson assignments are not included as part of these MASTER ARTIST TEXTS. Assignments based on these texts will reach the student at proper intervals during his course of study. In the meantime, we urge the student to treasure these books as supplementary reference texts until the specific lesson assignments are received. - Walter J. Wilwerding