Greeting Loyal Airmen to this Good Friday.  For those of you of the Christian faith, we offer our most prayerful intentions that you and your loved ones celebrate a joyous and wonderful Easter.  May the Lord Jesus, who sacrificed his own life to save us all, reward each and every one of you with his boundless graces of love and charity.
Amen.

Keeping in mind, the Air Chief is a post World War II baby-boomer in 1946, we grew up all the way into our teens in a world where men wore hats.  For the most part they for small or wide brimmed fedoras and they were the norm.  Now our father wasn't particularly a hat-guy himself, but he would always don a dapper number when going to church on Sunday.  He would have been particularly spiffy on this coming Easter Sunday. Again, hats were very much the norm and the Air Chief still has memories of walking past haberdasher shops as a kid.  For you young readers, that's a hat store.  Trying finding one of those anywhere these days.

It would be hard to pin-point exactly when the culture changed, but if memory serves me correctly, men's hats remained in fashion throughout the 50s but when the long-haired hippie movement of the early 60s rolled onto the cultural scenes, things began to change.  Obviously if a young dude was starting to wear his hair down to his shoulders, like a girl, then putting a hat on it only added to the hilarity of the image.  And so, as hair grew longer, the sales of hats waned…and waned until by the mid 60s they had indeed gone out of fashion.  Today, if the Air Chief takes a trip through town, he'll most likely see baseball caps as the more popular headgear for today's males.  Although out here in Colorado, you'll also see a smattering of cowboy hats for sure.

Now we bring this all up today because one of the most frustrating things we, at Airship 27 Productions, deal with on a regular basis is having to coax today's young illustrators on how to draw a proper hat.  Really. Really.  As most of our pulp fiction takes place in the 30s and 40s, it is mandatory that our illustrators draw these period hats and it causes them all kinds of fits.  They just don't get how to do it properly.

Recently a friend of our posted the above HOW TO DRAW THE HAT schematics on Facebook and we immediately shared it to our own FB page.  Where it instantly drew all kinds of sympathetic comments from other writers and editors with our same problems. Of course several of our young regular artists chimed in as well echoing what we've stated here; that brought up in a world with no hats, they are at a distinct disadvantage in how to capture them properly.  Some were even happy we'd posted the above pages which they were going to be keeping in their files from now on.

                          
Finally we thought it only fair to end this week's Flight Log with an example on how it is done properly. Above is one of the recent illustrations done by Art Director Rob Davis for our latest SECRET AGENT X title.  Rob is an old hand at drawing hats as is evidence in this wonderful illustration.  Like everything else, he says it just takes lots and lots of practice. Ha.  Still, its a fascinating subject, the changes in fashion and one has to wonder if maybe some day men's hats might not make a come back?  And if so, in what shape or style.  Hmm, now that could prove very, very interesting.

Finally, we once again wish all our Loyal Airmen a truly HAPPY EASTER!!!  The day after the new baseball season opens with out beloved Red Sox taking on their main rivals, the New York Yankees in New York.  Now that's the way to kick of Spring.

Ron – Over & Out!