Painting Pictures with John R. Neill

A neat item arrived in today's mail. Technically it belongs to Eric, but he said I could blog about it. It's a full page of John R. Neill art printed in the Philadelphia North American for a coloring contest. It's pretty early in Neill's career, too, dating from April 20, 1902, two full years before he illustrated his first Oz book, The Marvelous Land of Oz, in 1904.

This particular example of the North American children's page came with "paints" printed on the page so children could color the image. The "paints" really work - you just use water and a brush to activate the color spots and you're ready to go! Luckily the child this paper was delivered to got bored after sloppily painting a bit of blue on one little girl.

Neill did a number of these paintable pictures and W. W. Denslow did a few paintable Billy Bounce comic strips, too. It seems to me newspapers were a lot cooler 110 years ago.