History
Gateway Engineer days
Liturgical Publications
Freelance stuff from the 80's
Photos
Teen and childhood artwork
Family artwork
Selling your work

This was a fun job. It was my first, 'real', full-time job as an artist.

Liturgical Publications, located in Ellisville, Missouri, published church bulletins for (primarily Catholic) churches all over the country. The bulletins were paid for by ads on which appeared on the back of the bulletin. These are still commonly used in Catholic churches, but now there are many competitors to Ligurgical Publications.

There were five of us in the day shift art department. The job consisted of taking galleys, clip art and instructions for layout, and placing everything on a keylining 'board' (heavy white cardboard with blue lines on it). We averated 4-5 bulletins an hour. Ads were also placed on the back of the bulletin, and we took care of those as well.

We used a huge, 15 ft. camera to get "stats" of the artwork - reducing or enlarging the original logo or photo to fit where needed. The camera exposed the artwork on to photographic paper, which was then waxed and placed on t he board like the galley. Exacto blades, trianges, T-squares, rapidographs and non-photo blue pencils were regular materials we used. This work was active and allowed you to work with your hands.

In comparison to modern-day computer layout, I think there was very little time saved in terms of cutting and pasting. Typesetting is easier, but making things look good by a layout artist still seems to take the same amount of time.

Also shown above are some of my old illustrations from Ligurgical. During holidays we were allowed to get more creative, and develop cover choices for churches to use. You can see that I was very hand-challenged! The hands are terrible, and Mary looks like a man!