Edgar Earl MacPherson was born on August 3, 1910, in Oklahoma. He moved to Los Angeles after high school, got a job painting movie posters for a downtown theatre, and took evening art classes at the Chouinard School of Art. In 1929 he set up shop at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu, painting portraits of wealthy guests.
McPherson's success with the Artist's Sketch Pad was followed by another triumph when his two deck set of Pin Up Girls playing cards for Brown & Bigelow, called, " Win, Lose, or Draw" received a total of 168,000 orders in four months. He began receiving contracts for pin up girl posters. MacPherson painted a very famous pin-up image for the Shaw-Barton Calendar Company. The best-selling image in the company's 1941 line, Going Places was so popular that Lucky Strike cigarettes asked to reproduce it on their 1942 calendar with the caption "Lucky Strike Green Goes to War". His diary-style calendar, "Something to Remember", was his last success before he went off to war in 1944.
In 1951, MacPherson was stricken with polio, and his assistant, Jerry Thompson, took over the Sketch Book calendar series under the name T N. Thompson. In the early 1950s, MacPherson had his own television show in Arizona; about 1960, he moved to Tahiti and then traveled widely in the South Pacific. He died in December 1993.