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 […]
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 […]
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? […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
Digital Trends: The best free drawing software. “…Adobe’s popular titles aren’t your only options. The following solutions are highly competitive with Illustrator and Photoshop, but don’t break the bank. They are backed by a community of developers who believe you should have the best tools possible through an open-source platform.”
University of North Carolina: William Blake Archive Publishes Digital Edition of Blake’s Early Pencil Drawings. “The William Blake Archive, one of UNC’s flagship public and digital humanities initiatives, recently published a digital edition of Blake’s forty-three pencil drawings made during his early years as an artist, spanning from 1779-1790. The Blake Archive provides access to […]
Thanks to John O. for bringing this to my attention. From the Clements Library Chronicles: Announcing the Illustrated Manuscripts Project. “For over 15 years, as Clements Library staff have processed manuscript collections, read letters, and hunted for information, we’ve also been documenting the hand-made drawings that appear throughout the Manuscripts Division. To date we’ve identified […]
Engadget: AI-powered instant camera turns photos into crude cartoons. “Most cameras are designed to capture scenes as faithfully as possible, but don’t tell that to Dan Macnish. He recently built an instant camera, Draw This, that uses a neural network to translate photos into the sort of crude cartoons you would put on your school […]
Galway Daily: Amazing new database with pics of 18th and 19th Century Ireland launched. “How was Ireland depicted in illustrations produced by travellers from 1680 to 1860? A new database of images drawn from travel accounts answers this question. Based on years of research by a group of investigators at NUI Galway led by Professor […]