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 [...]
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- [...]
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. [...]
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 [...]
In a previous post I showed you some vintage photographs of New York City which can be found on Wikimedia Commons. Today, I want to show you some more great NYC images you can find in old guide books to the city. As these have been extracted from pdf files they are, of course, not [...]
A few post back, I was talking about online sources of vintage images. A great thing about searching for these images is that when searching, you end up going off on all sorts of wonderful tangents and making new discoveries. This weekend I had been researching historic, ornamental alphabets and was exploring the possibility of [...]
Sir William Russell Flint, best known for his watercolour treatments of the female form was the Artist Laureate to Queen Victoria towards the close of her reign. It is rather sad that, whilst in his day he was well known and highly regarded; his work today is largely unknown. You can see the influence of [...]
I wanted to share some illustrations with you today from one of my all time favourite books. First published in 1856, The Grammar of Ornament remains a design classic today .Its inspiration came from the pioneering architect and designer Owen Jones. His observations of decorative art on his extensive travels in Europe and the Near [...]
These rare and stunning 19th cenury volumes, illustrating the beauty of Gothic architectural ornament, suceed overwhelmingly in the authors ambitions to present “such a number of examples of foliage and other ornamental details of the different styles” of English Architecture,” as clearly to elucidate the characteristic features peculiar to each period, and drawn sufficiently large [...]
