Ken Featherston Posters from the Armadillo

This past weekend I attended an auction here in our little town just outside Austin. I was there to help work concessions, but as sometimes happens I also found something interesting to bid on. This time I hit the motherload. In among a variety of the usual household goods from someone’s estate was an envelope stuffed with classic show posters from the golden age of Austin’s legendary club scene.

All told the envelope contained about 15 posters from a variety of artists and venues, including many from famous venues which are no longer with us like the Armadillo World Headquarters and Soap Creek Saloon. Artists represented in the collection included some of the best of the era like Ken Featherston, Guy Juke and Michael Priest. Much to my surprise after a brief bid-off with an aging local hippy I won the lot of posters for just $50, a great investment if I planned to sell them, with some of the posters typically priced in the $75 to $100 range.

When I got the posters home and had a chance to go through with them I got a better feel for what I had won.  The unifying characteristic seems to be that all of the posters originated in 1974 which was pretty close to the height of the career of the Armadillo World Headquarters, which only lasted for 10 years, from 1970 to 1980.  During that era it showcased an amazing selection of musical acts, including the greats of the psychedelic 60s, amazing blues musicians and emerging rock and punk bands which would go on to greater fame.  Everyone played there from AC/DC to ZZTop.  The success — musically if not financially — of the Armadillo was the genesis of the vibrant Austin club scene of today and the large number of live music venues which make Austin the “live music capitol of the world.”

The artist represented most among the posters is Ken Featherston, whose career was closely linked to that of the Armadillo and who has more or less vanished in obscurity in recent yeas.  At the height of the era he was a revered figure, designing amazing and dynamic posters and considered on a par with the great artists of the Fillmore poster scene in San Francisco.  There were five Featherston posters in the package, representing some of his best work, including his Marshall Tucker poster which I consider one of his very best and also his original menu design which was used at the Armadillo for most of the decade.

Featherston’s work was always remarkably detailed and imaginative, and he particularly appeals to me because of his excellent lettering, which often drew on the styles of Art Nouveau master Alphons Mucha, particularly the styles represented in our Slava and Moravia fonts, although Featherston’s art was stylistically much grittier and realistic than Mucha’s preferred approach. Featherston was also a master of his medium, using clever techniques to provide texture and depth to his monochrome images.

I wish I could direct you to a web page for Featherston, but his site which was previously hosted by Threadgill’s restaurant seems to have gone offline. However,  if you want to see some nice samples of his work he’s heavily featured on fillmoreposter.com where many of his designs are available for sale or at least for viewing.

For someone working in the graphic arts and with a fondness for the music and visual vision of the 1960s discovering these posters was a real opportunity to look backwards and remember an artistic heritage which many designers are stil trying to recreate today.  It was a discovery which I had to share, so enjoy these outstanding examples of Ken Featherston’s work and remember the music and the art which still live on.


This article originally appeared in a slightly different form on Blogcritics Magazine.

Accessing a Complete Product List

A customer contacted us recently and wanted to know if it was possible to access a complete list of products without having to go through all the information and topical pages which we normally use to present products.

While more informational pages are obviously useful to first time visitors, it does make sense that those who already know what they are looking for might find it helpful to just be able to look down a list and pick the items they already know about.

A system to do this is already built into the site, but it’s not obvious or easy to find. This should help. For a full alphabetical list of products including all of our fonts and much more, just click HERE.

New Font: Caelian

The fascination with letterpress fonts continues, and one of the key element of any letterpress design is a heavy, bold block font. To fill that need we developed Caelian from samples we found in letterpress posters. To preserve the spirit of letterpress we created both a clean regular version and a rough version with two different variants of each character. There’s no lowercase, but a custom set of small caps which goes with the regular character set.

You can download and try the demo version of Caelian, which includes characters from all the different sets, in TrueType format for Mac or PC. It includes a mix of characters from the different variants of the font. You can also order the full set with both fonts online for immediate download: BUY IT NOW.


Heidelberg Archive of Jugend Magazine

One of the great expressions of the Art Nouveau movement was the magazine Munchner Jugend which became the focus of an entire movement of German art known as Jugenstil. Copies of Jugend are getting expensive and far behind, but in a recent search for something else I stumbled on an archive of scans of issues of Munchner Jugend from 1896 to 1895 available on the web from Heidelberg University.

The scans are of variable quality, but at high resolution. They were scanned more for reference than to preserve the art, but they do include every page of every issue, including advertisments. The problem is that even though they are scanned at a high quality resolution, many of the scans are distorted and discolored and little care was taken with making sure they were well placed or even flat on the scanning surface. There was also no effort to color correct or clean up the images. They make a great reference source, but would require a lot of work to make the images usable or up to the quality of those found in our Jugendstil Package of fonts and art.

Nonetheless it’s well worth checking out. The collection does not include earlier issues, and many of those in the first half of the 1890s included some excellent artwork. The quality of the magazine also declined considerably after the outbreak of World War I, so with a lot of material to look through, focus your browsing on the early 1900s and you’ll see some the best art without having to wade through too much junk.

Art & Symbol Fonts Collection

Art fonts (sometimes called “dingbats”) have their origins in early printers ornaments used to fill space on a printed page. Traditionally these ornaments took the form of floral or geometric designs, and were inserted when the page was set, just like type.


Modern art fonts are able to reproduce more complex images so they can also draw on the tradition of artists marginalia and other simple illustrations designed to accompany text. Marginalia perform a similar function to printers ornaments, but are usually more specialized and more characteristic of the work of a particular illustrator or the theme of the book in which they originate.


Traditionally most art fonts are fairly primitive, drawing on mostly functional
themes, such as international sign symbols or recreating antique printers ornaments. But the medium of digital type is capable of much more, and we try to explore some of those possibilities with our art fonts. They go beyond the primitive concept of the “dingbat” and provide a more sophisticated range of small, versatile illustrations which will enhance documents very effectively.

In exploring the potential of art fonts we owe a great debt to Arthur Rackham and some of the other artists who liberally decorated their books with marginal figures and scenes which are visually striking, yet simple enough to work well as characters in a typeface. Rackham was involved in every aspect of the production of many of the books on which he worked, and his role went well beyond the normal scope of the illustrator. He did so much decorative work on his books that we have 6 different fonts based on his marginalia.


We also have many of historically based art fonts, drawn from ancient images and
decorative arts, including Roman tiles, Native American pottery painting and medeival
heraldry, plus a selection of humorous and whimsical silhouettes.


All of our art fonts are available in both True Type and Postscript format for Macintosh and PC computers. They can be purchased individually for prices ranging from $9 to $12, or in a special CD collection with more than 25 of our art fonts for $69.00.


Our single fonts and art font packages can be ordered online, by mail or by
phone for delivery online or by mail. The special collection of all of the initials includes dozens of unique art fonts suitable to a wide variety of uses.

To the Complete Art Fonts package visit our ONLINE STORE or check out the section of Art Fonts you can order and download individually. To order by phone call 1-800-797-8973.

We’ve also got a free sample art font for you to try out. It features selected characters from some of our most popular art fonts and you can download it for free.


This font includes characters from Sigil (A-D), Decoration (E-H), Sangrael (I-K), Zapatec (L-N), Spirals (O-P), Florissant (Q-R), Mesoglyphs (S-T), Emblem (U-V), Hexstar (W-X) and Celtic Borders (Y-Z) – all upper case letter positions. Click here to download it for either WINDOWS or MacOS

Classic Font: Buccaneer

Buccaneer was one of our early font designs, originating way back in 1994 as part of the development of our Howard Pyle Fonts and Art collection. Buccaneer is based on the lettering which Pyle did for the frontispieces of his Book of Pirates and Book of the American Spirit. The lettering style was clearly designed to create the look of early wood type and our font preserves that effect very successfully.

Buccaneer has been quite successful since it was released, appearing in games, on book covers and most notably in titles for several movies by director Tim Burton, including The Corpse Bride. It has gone through several revisions since it was first released and now includes an extensive foreign language character set as well as a selection of alternate versions of the standard characters. It’s an excellent font when you want the look of antique and crudely printed type.

You can try the demo version of Buckaneer for free, or order the full version of Buccaneer online with the complete expanded character set.

Robin Hood and the Fallacy of Gilding the Lilly

There’s a strange tradition in book publishing which compels editors to decide periodically that a classic illustrated book needs to be reinvented and illustrated by a new artist to appeal to a contemporary audience. This decision is usually driven by the belief that you can sell more books if you can pass them off as worthy of purchase because of new art. There is risk inherent in this strategy when previous illustrators set the bar too high for their successors to exceed or even approach, leading buyers to reject the new edition as an inferior shadow of the classic.

The most famous example of this is Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland which went through three illustrators in its first 50 years in print with definitely mixed results. When the lack of color in the original extraordinary pen and ink drawings by the legendary John Tenniel seemed too pedestrian for a new generation accustomed to color, the publisher turned to Arthur Rackham. Not a bad choice since Rackham was already established as the greatest book illustrator of his age and arguably the greatest book illustrator of the last two centuries. Rackham had the skills and imagination to top Tenniel and not embarrass himself trying. But even Rackham’s classic work was not sufficient, and within 20 years it fell to the estimable Charles Folkard to try to top Rackham’s work with something more lush and with richer colors. Folkard’s illustrations are brilliant, but now largely forgotten, because fine though they were, they came after artists whose work was impossible to outdo. The publisher had essentially set Folkard an impossible task and the result was an edition which vanished into obscurity.

The situation with Alice is hardly unique, and as classic works go out of copyright it seems to become more common as more publishers have the opportunity to make bad decisions and desecrate classics with inferior illustrations.

Perhaps the most bizarre is the decision to publish books by writers who illustrated their own work with their illustrations replaced by someone else’s interpretation of their ideas. With some who were primarily writers and only nominally artists like J. R. R. Tolkein this makes some sense, but in other cases where legendary artists also wrote the texts they illustrated the decision just seems bewildering.

A case in point is a relatively recent edition of Howard Pyle’s classic The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood from Fall River Press which preserves Pyle’s stilted and archaic retelling of the tales, but replaces his remarkable and evocative illustrations with scratchboard vignettes by Scott McKowen. Now there’s no question that Pyle was an interesting writer and his version of the tales is a classic, but Pyle’s work as an artist and illustrator towers above his work as a writer. He’s not just an illustrator, he’s the greatest American book illustrator of the 19th century and the teacher who inspired subsequent generations of artists and revolutionized book illustration. To give any artist, no matter how skilled, the challenge of updating Howard Pyle is just ridiculous.

McKowen’s scratchboard illustrations are technically skilled, but sterile and a far cry from some of the more interesting illustrative work he has done for other projects, particularly graphic novels like 1602. I can only surmise that he was intimidated by the ludicrousness of being asked to do new art for a book Pyle had already illustrated and just fulfilled the contract, took his paycheck and walked off shaking his head at the absurdity of the assignment. The strangest part of the whole design concept of the book is that McKowen’s illustrations are effectively black and white sketches just like Pyle’s when the one area that you could argue there might have been a justification for redoing the illustrations would have been to add color, the one shortcoming of Pyle’s original work. Of course that problem was already addressed almost 100 years ago when Pyle’s student N. C. Wyeth added remarkable color plates to Pyle’s text.

My puzzlement at the editorial decision to reillustrate this Pyle classic seems well founded, because although I spotted one copy of the book on a shelf at Barnes and Noble, it appears not be available through Amazon which suggests that it has been a deservedly dismal commercial failure. Fall River Press is an imprint of Sterling Publishing which mainly exists to release reprints and specialty books through Barnes and Noble. Nonetheless you would think that their editors had more sense than to undertake such a wrongheaded project. Why spend the money on inferior new illustrations when the brilliant original illustrations are just as much in the public domain and just as free to use as the text itself. I’m sure McKowen’s work didn’t come cheap, making it a remarkably bad business decision, paying money to reduce the quality of the product, and the end result is a book which just seems sad and lackluster in comparison to the original.

It’s hard enough to make a profit in the print publishing industry these days, even if you have some guaranteed exposure through a big chain like Barnes and Noble. This kind of poor decision making is why there probably won’t be a Sterling Prsss or even a Barnes and Noble in a few years, though I bet that someone (probably Dover) will still be making money publishing facsimile editions of Howard Pyle’s books with the original illustrations and decorations intact.

Our Howard Pyle Font and Art Package includes many of the best illustrations from The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood and other classic works

Howard Pyle Fonts and Art Package


Howard Pyle was one of the most renowned illustrators of the 19th century. His work was widely published in adventure novels, magazines and romances. He was the founder of the Brandywine school and artists colony in Chadd’s Ford Pennsylvania, where he taught artists like N. C. Wyeth, Frank Schoonover and Thornton Oakley their craft.

Pyle both wrote and illustrated a number of classic books, including his enormously influential retellings of Robin Hood and King Arthur and His Knights which have great illustrations, but are also remembered as literary classics in their own right. His childrens books like Otto of the Silver Hand and The Wonder Clock are still in print more than 100 years after he wrote and illustrated them, and his paintings and murals on themes of American history grace the walls of museums and historic sites all over the nation.


Pyle’s talents were varied and in addition to doing fine color book plates he also did humorous line drawings, marginal decorations and even wrote poetry and fairytales. Some of his most interesting books like The Wonder Clock and Pepper and Salt are ones which he wrote, decorated and illustrated himself, with lavish – full size decorated pages. Perhaps the most dramatic example of Pyle’s originality is his illustrated edition of Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott, which has every page decorated and illustrated in full color with the text of the poem hand lettered and integrated with the illustrations. In many ways it is the ancestor of the modern comic book.


The Scriptorium’s Pyle collection features a large selection of images (both color and black and white), taken from various illustrated works, including magazine articles, books and other sources. They include illustrations on historical themes, such as Pyle’s classic pirate illustrations, plus historical, fantasy and fairytale topics. Also included are a variety of Pyle’s unique decorative border and frame designs and full decorated pages in his unique style.

Our Pyle collection also includes a selection of fonts based on Pyle’s original lettering. These include Pyle Gothic, based on his black letter style from Arthurian works, Courthand based on the lettering in his Lady of Shalott, Buccaneer from his pirate lettering and a set of decorative initials based on one of several sets which he designed. We are working on more Pyle fonts for the future, but the current set of five is a nice sampling of his lettering work.


All of the images in the collection are in high resolution suitable for use in print and are licensed for reprint within limitations specified in our standard license. All fonts come in both True Type and Postscript format for both Macintosh and Windows based computers. The whole collection is only $59. To order your own Howard Pyle collection remember the stock number (AT103) and give us a call at 1-800-797-8973, or visit our online ordering page — ONLINE ORDERING Note that there is also a special Howard Pyle Combo package available which includes the basic Pyle package, all the Pyle angel illustrations and the complete Lady of Shalott on one CD for a substantial savings at just $99.

If this package interests you check out our two other Pyle packages. We have a specialized package of Pyle’s angel illustrations and a special collection based on his illustrations for Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott. To see them, just click here: ANGELS or SHALOTT

If you want to try out one of our Pyle fonts, just download the demo version of Pyle Initials by clicking on the image below.

New Font: Vambrace

Back in March we held a poll to see which of five fonts we should put at the top of our development list and we ended up with three close contenders. Coming in third in that race was the design which we used as the basis for our new Vambrace font. Vambrace is basically a display and titling font which features a heavy outline style design. It’s very regular, but the characters are in a style which you might create with a Speedball style pen with a rounded nib for a poster or display card. The look is unusual and appealing and works well as a font.

You can download and try the demo version of Vambrace in TrueType format for Mac or PC. It includes a mix of characters from the different variants of the font. You can also order the full version online for immediate download: BUY IT NOW.

Magnificent Texas Skies

One of the nice things about living in Central Texas is that we get some of the most magnificent skies I’ve ever seen. Unlike some parts of the country which have fairly consistent weather we’re on the border between two climate zones and we get all sorts of peculiar storms and impressive cloud formations and about the bluest skies you can imagine. For a photographer this offers some great opportunities, and in this case it’s a bounty which can be shared.

One of the easiest tricks to do in Photoshop, or a similar graphics program, is to take a photo with a drab sky and replace it with something more dramatic and impressive. Overcast conditions and clear blue skies produce uniform skyscapes which can easily be replaced and using a real image is a great improvement on using Photoshop’s rather sterile cloud generator filter. In fact, in most cases you can just click on the sky with the magic wand tool and select the whole thing. You can then take a more interesting sky image and paste it into that space and it looks absolutely natural. If you’re going to blow the picture up large you may want to go over the boundary between the sky and the ground with the blur tool on a low setting if the transition isn’t perfect, but in most cases this isn’t even necessary.

There are several benefits to improving your skies. Sometimes the thing you want to photograph isn’t going to wait around for a better overall picture with a nicer looking sky. A sky with stronger colors also provides a better contrast and a better backdrop for images. It can actually make your main subject stand out more and add drama to the overall picture. Of course, it can also distract if it overwhelms your main subject. But there are a lot of photos which can be seriously improved by the addition of a powerful and dramatic skyscape.

A few days ago I had the opportunity to take a series of great sky photos as the edges of a tropical storm came through the Austin area. The result is a collection of 12 unique and dramatic Texas skyscapes which I’m making available here for download for your photo projects. Put them to good use.

Next Page »


Search Articles:




  • Latest Fonts



  • Waldeck Font

    Waldeck is a gothic font based on 17th century German calligraphy. It has elaborate, decorative uppercase characters and stylish but fairly simple lowercase characters, plus some unique features, including custom decorative descending flourishes for several of the characters. It's a nice change from some of our recent releases. Ultimately it will probably end up in a future expansion for our popular Gothic Fonts collection. Download and try out the free demo version of Waldeck (will work on Mac or PC). If you like it you can buy the complete character set with all the extra features from our Ordering Site.

    Stampwork Font

    We've done a lot of fonts lately based on antique type and lettering, so here's something brand new, a font designed to look like the output of a rubber stamp. It's in the tradition of our Draughtwork and Roughwork fonts, with a sort of technical look. Stampwork has two versions of the uppercase character set. One set features over and underline artifacts like those produced by the edge of a rubber stamp which is pressed down too hard. The other set is plain. There are also alternative line artifact characters to add variation. Download and try out the free demo version of Stampwork (will work on Mac or PC). If you like it you can buy the complete character set with all the extra features from our Ordering Site.

    Woburn Initials Font

    It's been quite a while since we did an initials font, so here is Woburn, a lovely set of floriate initials based on an early woodblock design which uses late gothic characters and adds nice, clean floral embellishments. As a bonus we've added a full lowercase character set in a compatible style. It also works well in combination with our classic Cymbeline font. Woburn will be added to the next release of our Decorative Initials collection. Download and try out the free demo version of Malvern (will work on Mac or PC). If you like it you can buy the complete character set with all the extra features from our Ordering Site.

    Malvern Font

    Malvern is a new Celtic-style font with upper case letters which are an attractive variant on insular minuscule lettering but with a unique lowercase character set which is stylistically compatible but not really part of the Celtic tradition. It fits well with the style of the fonts from our Celtic Fantasy collection, which it will probably eventually be added to. The uppercase characters are somewhat similar to our classic Durrow font, but with some additional flourishes. Download and try out the free demo version of Malvern (will work on Mac or PC). If you like it you can buy the complete character set with all the extra features from our Ordering Site.

    Orford Font

    Orford is based on samples of hand lettering from a 1693 manuscript collected by Lewis Day in his classic book on historical paleography, Alphabets Old and New. It is stylistically similar to our Allegheny font, but cleaner and clearer. It has characteristic clubbed ascenders on many of the lowercase letters, and alternate versions of a large selection of characters. It's an excellent example of colonial period calligraphy and works quite well as a font. It will eventually be incorporated in an updated release of our Colonial Fonts package. Download and try out the free demo version of Orford (will work on Mac or PC). If you like it you can buy the complete character set with all the extra features from our Ordering Site.
  • Tangle Font

    Tangle is a fun font drawn by hand to have the look of twining vines, reminiscent of a grape arbor in the winter. The inspiration is from my front gate which is twined with an endless tangle of mustang grape vines. It was designed on a whim, but turned out pretty well. It has a full upper and lower case character set, plus numbers and punctuation and special characters. Maybe some clever vintner will notice it and put it to use on a wine label. You can try out the free demo version of Tangle for either MacOS or Windows. It features just the upper case characters. The full version of Tangle is available on our Ordering Site.
  • Valentin Font

    Valentin is an Art Nouveau font with an eccentric, stylized look. It has the same fixed-weight characteristics as Ganelon and Gaheris, but the character forms are dramatically different. It's clean and clear and very readable, very much the kind of lettering you'd have seen on 1920s vaudeville playbills. The graphic with the letter sample to the right isn't part of the font, but seemed to fit stylistically. It's a bit of decorative marginalia from a book illustrated by Clara Peck which is just full of Arthurian theme illustrations and decorative motifs which are going to be included in our forthcoming Arthurian Fonts and Art package. You can try out the free demo version of Valentin for either MacOS or Windows. It features just the characters of the standard set. The full combined version of Valentin is available on our Ordering Site.
  • Posada Font

    José Guadalupe Posada was a Mexican printer, engraver, cartoonist and illustrator of the late 19th and early 20th century who was enormously influential on the development of Mexican Folk art styles which continue today. Posada is best known for his Calavera cartoons and illustrations which satirized his fellow Mexicans as skeletons in the tradition of Dia de los Muertos. Many of Posada's cartoons were published as single-sheet handbills and included original hand-lettered captions and titles in a style reminiscent of period newspaper headlines. We've previously collected many of Posada's Calavera lithographs in our Macabre Fonts and Art Collection and now we're releasing our first font based on Posada's lettering, somewhat unimaginatively tagged with his name. It's a rough and bold all-caps character set with alternative caps on the lower case keys, with an offset positioning which Posada used in a number of his cartoons, as demonstrated in the sample to the right. You can try out the free demo version of Posada for either MacOS or Windows. It features just the characters of the standard set. The full combined version of Posada is available on our Ordering Site.
  • More New Fonts

    To see samples of recent font releases and older demo fonts visit our Featured Fonts Page.


    Add to Technorati Favorites
    • This Week’s Top Sellers

    • 2009 Font and Art Sampler
    • Colonial Fonts
    • Arts and Crafts Fonts
    • Folkard Font
    • Walter Crane
    • Medieval Fonts and Art
    • Windlass Font
    • Hesperides Font
    • MapMaker Plus Fonts and Art

  • Recent Comments

  • Site Admin
  • Log out
  • Entries RSS
  • Comments RSS
  • WordPress.org
  • SSL