Mike Harney: Jacket Artwork Thumbnails Collection 1

Jacket Artwork Thumbnails

Collection 1

This is the first of three or four collections I'll be posting of jacket and other artwork I've done. Collection 1 includes most of my favorites. Click on any image to the left to see a full-size version.

Ginger Rogers at age 20, after a still from "Professional Sweetheart" (1933; see image below). That's a 1941 model Daffy Duck about to snap her garter strap. This one and the Rita Hayworth "Boeing Belle" are my two favorite jacket paintings. I wear "Ginger Snap" most of the time.

The Daffy Duck character is the property of Warner Brothers Studios.

Detail of just Ginger Rogers in the painting above.

The publicity still for "Professional Sweetheart" that inspired this painting. Don't ask me where I got the idea for Daffy tugging on her garter, though. It was just one of those things.

A PBY-5 Catalina of the 3rd Emergency Rescue Squadron, based in the Pacific in WWII. Painted for a veteran of the squadron.

My original drawing for the above painting.

"Beat Me Daddy 8 To The Bar" was an Andrews Sisters tune. The design on this one comes from a James Dietz painting that was on the cover of a paperback book. One B-17 of several being attacked by German fighters in the painting featured this nose art (about 1/4" high on the book). Dietz told me the nose art was fictional and was for a friend who likes big band music. He sent me a very large, poster-quality photograph of his original painting, which he described as "Schweinfurt as if Spielberg had directed it," in return for the color copy of this painting I sent him.

"Miss Barbara" was done for a member of a WWII airshow reenactment group whose wife's name is Barbara. The source of this pinup and the one above is Alberto Vargas. Both appeared in Esquire magazine in the '40s.

A change of pace: Dream (aka Morpheus) is a character in the DC/Vertigo Comics Sandman series. I did this on the front of a motorcycle jacket. Death is on the back (see below).

The Dream and Death characters are the property of DC/Vertigo Comics.

Death on the back of a motorcycle jacket. (Ooo, that's a lovely phrase, isn't it? Something Ed Wood might have written.) This one was fun: Death is wearing a black outfit, has jet black hair, and the jacket was black. I felt like I had parked my spaceship at The Restaurant at the End of the Universe until I came up with the idea of fingerpainting a light wash of blue around her.

The drawing I did before painting the above. I made her face a little more realistic than in the comic series. I was surprised when I finished this drawing by how much I liked it. I would love to meet this woman I imagined. Sigh.

This painting is on my portfolio. It also ended up as the two-page title spread of Hell-Bent for Leather, a history of flight jackets by Derek Nelson and Dave Parsons. In a future collection, I'll be posting the artwork of mine that was on the cover and inside that book. Inside the B-17 cockpit here are G.I. cartoon characters Hubert and Sad Sack.

"Miss Wing Ding" was a design on a B-17 in the 401st Bomb Group of the 8th Air Force. The crew also sported this artwork on their jackets. I found the source of this terrific design, too. It was a Petty painting for an Old Gold Cigarettes ad in the mid-1930s. From what I've seen of his work, it's probably the best pinup Petty ever painted. The 401st BG artist did a perfect job in reproducing it. I quite enjoyed painting this one because it's so colorful.

Detail of Ms. Wing Ding.

"Sleepy Time Gal" was also originally on a B-17 in the 8th Air Force in England. I got awfully tired painting this one for some reason.

Detail of "Sleepy Time Gal."

This is the end of collection 1. You can view collection 2 from here if you like. It's also accessible from the Departments page and the main flight jacket artwork page. I also have a page of my other artwork.