New York Times: Meet DALL-E, the A.I. That Draws Anything at Your Command. “At OpenAI, one of the world’s most ambitious artificial intelligence labs, researchers are building technology that lets you create digital images simply by describing what you want to see.”
Boing Boing: Draw a picture and this AI matches it to a movie image. “Hugging Face, a company that makes AI language-and-image-processing tools, just released this little web toy ‘Draw To Search’. You draw something and it attempts to recognize what you’ve drawn and match it to an image from a movie.”
Colossal: The Sketchbook Project Needs Help After Its Brooklyn Collection Grows to 55,000 Globally Submitted Books. “Colossal editor-in-chief Christopher Jobson spoke with Steven Peterman, the founder and managing director of The Sketchbook Project, in July 2021. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.”
Getty: Innovation in Prints and Drawings Is the Focus of New Getty Grants. “Prints and drawings are an unsung area of curatorial innovation and a place for museums to bring new forms of storytelling to their permanent collections. Nineteen new grants totaling over $1.55 million will support exhibitions, publications and digital projects that center the graphic arts as part of the Getty Foundation’s ongoing Paper Project initiative. Launched in 2018, The Paper Project funds professional development and experimental projects for curators around the world who study prints and drawings to make graphic arts collections more accessible and relevant to 21st-century audiences.”
Library of Congress: Library Acquires Courtroom Sketches of Trials on Police Brutality Against Rodney King. “The Library of Congress has acquired more than 200 sketches of the Rodney King police brutality trials against four Los Angeles police officers in the 1990s, drawn by courtroom sketch artist Mary Chaney (1927-2005).”
The Guardian: Italy begins year of Dante anniversary events with virtual Uffizi exhibition. “Eighty-eight rarely seen drawings of Dante’s The Divine Comedy have been put on virtual display as Italy begins a year-long calendar of events to mark the 700th anniversary of the poet’s death. The drawings, by the 16th-century Renaissance artist Federico Zuccari, are being exhibited online, for free, by the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.”
Architectural Digest: There’s Now an Online Museum Dedicated Entirely to Diagonal Lines (Yes, Really). “Joel Levinson was in his second year of architecture studies at the University of Pennsylvania when he overheard two students speaking as if they were up to no good. These being fellow building buffs, however, their illicit conversation turned out to be a far cry from planning house parties while perched in the library stacks. Instead, the whispered dialogue was more of the drafting table variety: ‘They were talking about attaching triangular shapes into their otherwise orthogonal, blocky building designs,’ Levinson recalls. At the time, Levinson was intrigued. But today, he credits the moment with catalyzing his lifelong interest in what he refers to as ‘diagonality,’ or put more simply, the study of diagonal lines.”
Phys .org: The microbiome of Da Vinci’s drawings. “The work of Leonardo Da Vinci is an invaluable heritage of the 15th century. From engineering to anatomy, the master paved the way for many scientific disciplines. But what else could the drawings of Da Vinci teach us? Could molecular studies reveal interesting data from the past? These questions led an interdisciplinary team of researchers, curators and bioinformaticians, from both the University of Natural Resources and Life Science and the University of Applied Science of Wien in Austria, as well as the Central Institute for the Pathology of Archives and Books (ICPAL) in Italy, to collaborate and study the microbiome of seven different drawings of Leonardo Da Vinci.”
Smithsonian Magazine: You Can Now Explore 103 ‘Lost’ Hokusai Drawings Online. “Earlier this month, the British Museum announced its acquisition of a trove of newly rediscovered drawings by Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai, who is best known for 19th-century masterpiece The Great Wave Off Kanagawa. Visitors can’t yet see the illustrations in person, but as the London institution notes in a statement, all 103 works are now available to explore online.”
Thank you John S. for the pointer to this from Kottke: Database of old book illustrations. “Here’s an enormous library of thousands of old book illustrations, with searchable name, artist, source, date, which book it was in, etc. There are also a number of collections to browse through, and each are tagged with multiple keywords so you can also get lost in there in that manner.” John mentioned that this site is an absolute timesink. He’s not wrong.
BBC: Meet the artist who draws scientists for Instagram. “How do you raise the profile of women in science, equipped only with pens and pastel pencils? That’s the challenge Nina Chhita set herself after being asked to identify scientists at a Christmas quiz.”
BBC: Molly Russell: Instagram extends self-harm ban to drawings. “Instagram has pledged to remove images, drawings and even cartoons showing methods of self-harm or suicide. The move is its latest response to the public outcry over the death of British teenager Molly Russell.”
California Secretary of State: California State Archives Digitizes its Complete, “Diseños Collection” of Hand-Drawn Spanish and Mexican Land Grant Maps. “This collection contains images of 493 hand-drawn sketch maps that were originally created from 1827-1846. The hand-drawn sketch maps, or diseños, were used by the Spanish, Mexican, and U.S. governments to demonstrate land grant boundaries for individuals…. The diseños in the State Archives’ collection are complete and accurate copies of the original hand-drawn maps and were created in the 1860s as directed by the California Legislature. This is the first time that the State Archives’ collection has been digitized and available online in full color.”
My Modern Met: Growing Database of “Women Who Draw” Spotlights 5,000+ Female Illustrators. “Women Who Draw is an open directory featuring 5,000 professional illustrators, artists, and cartoonists. As its title suggests, all of the artists included in this ongoing project identify as women—especially those who art history has largely ignored. To remedy this age-old problem, the database prioritizes work by artists from minority groups, including women of color and those who belong to the LBTQ+ community.”
A press release from Boston College hipped me to a resource that launched last year but I had not heard about: The Becker Collection. From the front page: “The Becker Archive contains approximately 650 hitherto unexhibited and undocumented drawings by Joseph Becker and his colleagues, nineteenth-century artists who worked as artist-reporters for Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly observing, drawing, and sending back for publication images of the Civil War, the construction of the railroads, the laying of the transatlantic cable in Ireland, the Chinese in the West, the Indian wars, the Chicago fire, and numerous other aspects of nineteenth-century American culture. These ‘first-hand’ drawings, most of which were never published, document in lively and specific ways key developments in the history of America as it struggled to establish its national identity.”
