Roy Cross

Roy Cross (* 23. April 1924 in Southwark / London ) is a British marine painter , who through his cover illustration for the kits from Airfix was crucial to the image of the company 1970 in the 1960 / years. Cross is a member of the Royal Society of Marine Artists and the Guild of Aviation Artists .

activity

Cross, whose father was a plumber , grew up in a modest family. Although he wanted to attend an art school because of his artistic ambitions, especially for airplanes , at 15 he was forced to work as an office worker for a shipping line. However, he trained in his spare time self-taught and was during the Second World War, worked as an illustrator for Aircraft, where he drawings anfertigte for training regulations. At the end of the war he worked as a freelancer for aviation companies.

This activity enabled him to complete courses at the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts and the St. Martins School of Art after the war . After working for the comic magazines Fairey Aviation and Eagle , he managed to get a contract as chief illustrator at Airfix in 1964 , also as a freelancer.

His first work for Airfix was in 1963 the cover for the kit of moderate Bombers of the Luftwaffe Do 217 . Cross' preferred technique was gouache . He illustrated kits for airplanes, space rockets like the Saturn V , ships , tanks and other military vehicles as well as figures. Among the ships were the HMS Nelson , the HMS Belfast , HMS Iron Duke in the Battle of the Skagerrak , the armored cruiser Graf Spee , the battleship Tirpitz and Francis Drake's galleon Golden Hind .

In the mid-1970s, Cross decided to work as a freelance marine painter, partly due to a lack of orders due to the waning interest in model making. The last commissioned work for Airfix took place in June 1974. Cross now worked for a London gallery , the owner of which emigrated to the USA , but maintained contact with Cross and in turn brought him into contact with an art dealer who brokered orders for Cross in the States .

literature

• Arthur Ward: Airfix. Celebrating 50 years of the world's greatest plastic kits , London (HarperCollinsPublishers) 1999. ISBN 000 765782 X
• Arthur Ward: Celebration of Flight. The Aviation Art of Roy Cross , The Crowood Press 2002. ISBN 1-84037-326-1
• William Green: Russia's Jets and other Aircraft ... With artist's impressions by Roy Cross , Sevenoaks (Smith & Hallam) 1951.

Web links

• Interview of the Museum of Childhood with Cross about his artistic work, 2012
• Airfix Box Art by Roy Cross - Nostalgia is a (beautiful) thing of the past! Video clip on youtube.com with pictures of Cross, length approx. 6 min.