Your PopCulteer is still working in pencil again this week.  Armed with my trusty Blackwing Palamino, a tissue for smudging and a sharpener and a ruler (well, an Architect’s Scale, to be precise), I sat in front of my computer screen and dashed off a quick outline of this drawing of the famous 1937 prototype steam engine, the PRR S1, duplex steam locmotive engine AKA “The Big Engine” sporting an Art Deco shell designed by Raymond Loewy. Even though only one of these was ever built, and it wasn’t put into full production because it was too long to navigate the curves on the Pennsylvania Railroad, it remains one of the coolest-looking Art Deco behemoths every created, so I wanted to try to do justice to it in pencil form.

You can read about the PRR S1 at its Wikipedia page.

Once I got the outline where I wanted it, a few hours of rendering and shading happened on the kitchen table. I have to confess to a little bit of digital smudge and fingerprint removal, after I scanned it into the PC.

This is yet another one of my practice pieces as I teach myself how to make physical art again. It was my first time using pencils on Pentalic Paper For Pens ultrasmooth finish paper (thank you Blick Art Supplies).

If you wish, you can click this image to see it bigger.

Meanwhile, over in radio-land, Monday on The AIR, our Monday Marathon runs from 7 AM to 3 PM, and brings you four episodes of Radio Free Charleston International, which will soon be saying goodbye to our servers, as RFC International and Radio Free Charleston are now combined into Radio Free Charleston Volume Five.   At 3 PM, we will present an encore of a recent edition of Prognosis, because show’s host, Herman Linte, is still tied up with other work.

You can listen to The AIR at the website, or on this embedded radio player…