Blimp

Seeing a blimp takes me back to the 80's when I worked at an advertising agency in Akron, OH. One of their clients was Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company. Most of their advertising centered around a blimp image. Sometimes I'd do an illustration of a blimp with the Goodyear logo on it. Once while driving around Akron I saw these huge shapes coming out of the mist in the distance....they turned out to be three of the largest building domes I've ever seen. Turned out Akron used to have three extremely large blimps that flew all over and this used to be their hangars. This older man that I worked with told me when he was a kid all of a sudden there would be like an eclipse of the sun and it was one of these blimps flying over. They were so huge. Compared to the blimps you see now days would be like a rowboat next to a cruise ship. When he was older and WWII was on, he worked in one of these hangers and they were mass producing Spitfire airplanes. He took the blueprints and wrote a book showing in easy to read diagrams how the planes should be assembled.

He was a master of things like this. He could take a blueprint and draw a tire from it that was in perfect 3D proportions. Then he'd airbrush it and it would look like a photo of that tire. Some of the ads for Goodyear showed tires that only he had envisioned/painted as the tires had not been manufactured yet.