When I was in my early teens, I spent many hours staring in goggle-eyed fascination at the illustrations in “science magazines”, like Popular Science, Popular Mechanics and Science and Mechanics, that depicted future tech.
The illustrators created scenes of potential space missions and spacecraft, both actually proposed and wildly imaginative, fantastic airships, monorails, undersea cities and other views of a promised idealized tech-wonderland future.
Apparently my adolescent counterparts in then-Soviet Russia were doing the same, as this wonderful Russian blog is showing us by posting vintage Russian science and space illustration from the 1960’s and 1970’s.
Like entertainment concept artists, these illustrators are showing us things that don’t exist, but might; in many cases, giving us and “X-ray” view with cutaways.
Even though most of the more fanciful future tech didn’t come to be (I’m still waiting for my personal rocket pack and driveway gyrocopter), fascination with this kind of illustration remains strong.
[Via ModernMecanix by way of BoingBoing]
Reminiscent of giant-inventor DaVinci, who is presumed to have an IQ of 220.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQM0bfBQvDA&feature=player_embedded#at=33
Pity, I don’t read Cyrillic.
Good one, Charley! Back in high school I actually sent away for the gyrocopter plans from Science & Mechanics and all I could think of was how cool it would be to fly it to school and set down in the middle of the football field. You know, I think I may still have those plans somewhere…!
Hi, Charley!
I’m Matt Leyva. I came across the blog while searching for art and drawing blog through Google. The site looks really great.
These types of paintings are very interesting. i know exactly what you mean when you refer to vintage Popular Science and Popular Mechanics magazines. I glance at them whenever I am at my local library. There seemed to be a much more positive and optimistic view of the future in 1960. We’re a little more cynical in this current generation and artwork depicting the future now seems to be show much more apocalyptic images.
BTW the 5th pic down looks like some sort of space rooster :P.
Great find!
Thanks, Matt.
This is mind blowing to see how ahead of their time they were. Just goes to show how far we’ve come and how far we can actually go.
We have many more In the Green Tiger’s collection of matchbox labels and various Soviet Era art.
This Blog has inspired me to get to scanning some of our favorites,I have always been personally fond of the art/design style, it’s great to know there are others out there!