I watched something similar happen to my great uncle (grandpa's brother).
He was a commercial illustrator and had many projects for magazines, trade journals, pamphlets, brochures, stuff that all required "illustration" pictures of something relative to the business interspersed with text. He would research, draw, and paint/color scenes that ended up as wall art in corporate lobbies, stuff that you see every day but just becomes part of the background. Like this artist, we had furniture filled with pencil sketches, and working art.
Unfortunately, his business was nearly entirely supplanted by computers and he simply didn't make the switch to digital production. In retrospect three decades would need to pass before digital art tools would match his ability and be affordable.
He died with no heirs and few of his friends remain. I'm in my 30s; I doubt anyone my age outside of my family knows who he is. My parent's extended family think fondly of him and will cherish the art they have but he will disappear in time.
The most "valuable" part of his legacy is not his artwork but his lifelong hobby of photographing his vacations with Kodachrome. We have hundreds of color slides through the late 40s up until the 2000s of national parks, towns, people, cars in brilliant color. I would like to scan them but don't know where to put them; where do people go nowadays to see albums?
I don't want to get them locked up behind a service that get's abandoned or must be buyware like Ancestry.com
