A masterpiece created on deadline: The perseverance of Norman Rockwell

How far would you go on a drawing or a painting before you decided you just have to completely scrap it and start over fresh? That's what we're going to be talking about in today's video. And we're going to be talking about it by looking at a particular Saturday Evening Post cover by Norman Rockwell. Welcome back to my channel. My name is Thomas Tilly. I'm a comic book artist and an illustrator. And a lot of you may be familiar with this particular Norman Rockwell Saturday Evening Post cover. It's one of his more famous holiday covers. It's a Thanksgiving cover. It's not the famous one with Everyone at the Dinner Table. You know the one I'm talking about. But I actually like this one better than that one. I talked about it in a video that I made last year around this time. And there's just such a great subtlety to the body language and the facial expressions in that painting. It evokes a lot of really sweet and tender kind of emotions, but it's also so expertly painted, too. There's so much incredible detail in the atmosphere. It's almost as though you can like smell the environment and like feel the chairs they're sitting on and the ground beneath them. There's just something so real about it, for lack of a better word, without it feeling stiff and photographic. Norman Rockwell was one of those painters that was able to straddle that line between photo realism and almost cartooning in a way. He was able to exaggerate in these little subtle ways that let you know that it wasn't 100% real from a distance. Certainly, these looked like photographs a lot of the time, but he would just be able to exaggerate facial features and things like hands and feet just slightly to enter it into that world of story and fantasy. But I recently sort of learned a little bit more about the story behind that painting and I thought I would share it with you because I found it to be a very fascinating one and also something that I think a lot of us artists can relate to. Whether you're a professional artist or an aspiring artist or just someone who likes to do this in their spare time, there's something about investing a certain amount of time and creative energy into a piece only to get to a certain point in it where you're completely unsatisfied with it. you you know that things are off and it's just not working and then you kind of reach that crossroads of do I continue down this path and try to make it work or do I completely start over fresh and the process behind this particular Norman Rockwell