EXTRACTS: Illustrators issue 8 © 2014 The Book Palace (96 PAGES in Full edition)

35 American illustrators headed for Detroit and New York City. Those who didn’t live in the city went to live in Westport in Connecticut, which became an illustrators’ colony, from where they travelled into Grand Central Station to visit their clients on Madison Avenue, and in mid-town Manhattan. They were heady times. However, Forbes chose to pursue a different path and decided to stay out West, setting up shop in Dallas, Texas, which he thought would be inexpensive and relatively pressure-free, leaving him to develop an individual style in his own time. He set up a studio away from his home, to avoid the distractions of bringing up a young family. “It also helped me to be able to walk away from a painting at six o’clock; go home and have supper, play basketball with my son Ted, and not worry about what I was working on until the next morning,” he said. “If I had a studio in the house, I know I would have gone back in after supper and start fiddling with the job I was working on.” He worked in a building with fellow illustrator Jack Unruh, and Jack Summerford, a graphic LEFT: Forbes captures the gritty romance of the Old West in this illustration for Boy’s Life painted in 1995.