Radebaugh's
brief studies at the Art Institute in Chicago (he “found the bright
lights more interesting than classes”) led to his first experimentation
with the airbrush.
He honed his technique with the airbrush while doing more mundane rendering
for Crescent Engraving in Kalamazoo, Michigan: designing boxes for chocolate
candy and the like.
One of the salesmen there saw Radebaugh’s airbrush work and asked if
he could act as the young man’s agent; he probably surprised them both
when he sold one of Radebaugh’s futuristic automotive renderings to
MoToR Magazine in 1935 for $450.
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After his first break,
Radebaugh burst onto the commercial illustration scene, seemingly fully formed,
and rapidly got work for Esquire, Fortune, Advertising Agency and other top-flight
magazines.
His luminous Art
Deco cityscapes complemented a sense of industrial design that was both pragmatic
and prescient: he took what was cutting edge, from telephones to travel trailers,
and made them more elegant, functional, and fantastical to behold.
His magazine work propelled him to some degree of recognition, and advertising
art directors took notice not only of Radebaugh, but of the odd medium in
which he worked, and began to respect airbrushing for the first time.
Radebaugh's rise as a commercial artist was interrupted by the US entrance
into World War 2.
He was enlisted into the Army Ordnance Department, where he headed up a Design & Visualization division.
He worked with fellow artists and industrial designers (notably, Will Eisner was working in the same office!), designing weapons of the future.
Radebaugh’s tenure at the Pentagon seems to have allowed him to hone
both his talent for futuristic designs and his penchant for the pragmatic.
He helped to develop armored cars, bazookas and artillery for the Army.
He was also charged with
developing a method of illuminating military vehicle instrument panels with
blacklight, thereby helping to conceal war planes, tanks and trucks from enemies
His involvement with the medium began a long obsession with blacklight and
flourescent paints.