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Continuing the series on the popular culture of the 1930s, I asked toy collector and inventor  Mel Birnkrant :  Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein and many other great monster movies come from the 1930s. How do those films relate to the economic background that they came out of? Mel says: “I guess you would call it Escapism, or getting away from the monstrous reality of the Depression to embrace reel monsters instead. Compared to 1930s reality, Frankenstein was barely scary. The ultimate cinematic Monsterpiece that set the bar sky high for all the creatures that followed after was King Kong. “King Kong was not quite the pussy cat that millions thought him to be. When the film was re-released in 1938, Hollywood censors cut out several scenes that they considered to be either too violent or too sexy. Thus many of us grew up thinking Kong was not a ruthless killer, but essentially a nice guy who was just misunderstood. “In 1972 a copy of the original movie was discovered in England, a

Emanuele Sangregorio  asks: “ I must ask what is the meaning in English of ‘overmodeling.’ I found it also in some Andrew Loomis books, but for shadow tones: Don’t ‘overmodel’ shadows.” Michael Cooley asks: “ What exactly is overmodeling? You mentioned this in one of your blogs. I was told I was overmodeling one of my early portraits. Im not sure what this means.” Gurney answers: I’m glad you asked. Overmodeling means using too large a range of values to describe a form, and often too many hard edges and planes.  For example, in the anonymous war bond poster at left, the artist used some rather dark values in the light areas and some rather light areas in the shadows. The plane changes in the forehead and the nose are stated more harshly than they need to be.  Typically beginning painters overmodel areas in the shadow when they should be handled simpler, softer, and flatter. The effect of overmodeling can be to make the form look shiny and hard and to break up the simple poster-like im