E A Séguy was a French decorative illustrator who produced 11 books of patterns and illustrations in the early part of the 20th century. A distinctive feature of both the Art Nouveau and Art Deco periods (across which his work spanned) was the drawing of inspiration from the beauty of nature. Presented here are sample [...]
Conrad Gesner’s Historiae Animalium was the first recognised zoological book and the frst attempt to describe all of the world’s known animals. Published in Zurich 1551 - 58, it was unusual at the time in that it featured many illustrations. Although it also featured mythical creatures, imagine the wonder an average citizen of the 16th [...]
French illustrator George Barbier led the ultra fashionable “Knights of the Bracelet” school of artists throught the 1910’s & 20’s. He designed theater and ballet costumes and worked with Erte on costumes for the Folies Bergere:
His style for me, exemplifies the cool decadance of the Art Deco period - you can almost imagine, just looking [...]
The following prints are taken from a 1922 book ‘Architectural Drawing‘ by Wooster Bard Field who was an Architect and Assistant Professor of Engineering Drawing at the Ohio State University.
These type of drawings are very popular at the moment as are any vintage materials related to building, house design / construction. Prints with this type of [...]
A few posts back, I spoke about the value of getting distracted and splitting onto different tangents when searching online for public domain resources for product creation. This week, whilst searching for something completely different I came across some vintage Japanese woodblock prints by Katsushika Hokusai.
These amazing prints were produced in the late 18th- early [...]
Well I finally got around to completing my World’s Fair listing on eBay (complete with snazzy slideshows) check it out—–>link
It took me a whole lot longer than I thought as I finished up going through the books page by page to rotate images (everything in landscape!) and some of them were 5-700 pages long.
Creating these [...]
Today I have been experimenting with the possibility of using a slideshow to display my images for an eBay listing. The reason I wanted to do this was that I have a new listing planned (a collection of books on the 1893 World’s Fair, Chicago) and I saved around 50 images to choose from for [...]
Whenever I come across an interesing image when browsing the net, searching for public domain material, I always save them into my ‘Pictures’ folder. This is done with good intention of creating a product from the image but, more often than not I never get around to it or get distracted with another project. This [...]
I wrote in recent post about acquiring public domain images from Wikimedia Commons and how to find them. Today, I wanted to show you a wonderful set of images I discovered taken from taken from Franz Meyer’s 1898 book ‘A Handbook of Ornament’. This work reproduces nearly three thousand geometric and natural motifs used to [...]
Fashion in Design
I’m a big fan of the art Nouveau school of design and, looking through a scan I found of a design textbook from the 1890’s got me to thinking, the maxim ‘what comes around goes around’ really does apply when it comes to fashions in design. A E V Lilley’s ‘Studies in Plant [...]
