Illustrator: Gil Elvgren

Gil Elvgren

He was born in 1914 in St.Paul, Minnesota, and decided to study art at the American Academy of Art in Chicago. Early he began working for Stevens and Gross, a highly reputed advertising agency and became the most favourite pupil of the great Haddon Sundblom who was very successful because of his Coca-Cola Santas.

In 1937 he worked for Louis F. Dow an important publishing company but approaching 1945 he found a better wage working for Brown & Bigelow. Along his artistic career he had numerous prestigious clients such as Coca-Cola, General Electric, Sealy Mattress Company, The Saturday Evening Post, or Good Housekeeping.

Elvgren pin-ups were beautiful but also real girls who were surprised most of the times in unexpected embarrasing situations. He wanted his models to be young and unkown, always looking for the girl-next-door style. His ideal pin-up had a fifteen-year-old face and a twenty-year-old body.

He died in 1980 because of a cancer at the age of sixty-five.