Johnson & Johnson: Driving Diversity in Medical Illustration. “To increase diverse representation in medical imagery—and to ultimately help improve health outcomes for people of color—the company has collaborated with Deloitte and the Association of Medical Illustrators to launch Illustrate Change, a growing library of medical illustrations featuring people of color.”
Golf Digest: Artist CR Obetz salvages the iconic drawings of illustrator Anthony Ravielli with 21st-century methods . ” As an artist, Obetz’s general instinct is to search for the lost and forgotten, so he ignored the paintings on the main walls and ventured into the back room where he found boxes containing thousands of sketches, notes and scratchboards littering a billiards table. Among them, he recognized the sharp black pen of Anthony Ravielli and knew he had to rescue them.” There’s some NFT stuff in here and it’s partially promotional with Golf Digest, so I almost didn’t include it. But the art is so good.
Sent to me by my Twitter pal Mandy W: The Charles Dickens Illustrated Gallery . From the About page. “Welcome to the Charles Dickens Illustrated Gallery! Here you will find all the original illustrations to Charles Dickens’s novels (and Sketches by Boz), where you are free to download, browse, share, remix, research, or use in whatever ways you can imagine.”
Noupe: Shutterstock alternatives: Best Vector Websites to Find Free Illustrations . “It’s no doubt that when it comes to design, having more options, and more inspiration is never wrong. In this post, I am going to list the 10 best vector websites to find and download free illustrations as Shutterstock alternatives.” I am making a Halloween Gizmo and using Flaticon for the graphics. Recommended.
Bangkok Post: Illustration fair returns for another edition. “After its successful debut last year, the Bangkok Illustration Fair returns to please illustrators and art lovers with a myriad of creative works, from Thursday to Sunday daily from 10am to 8pm. It will take place on the 1st floor, 3rd floor and at the Main Hall on the 9th floor of Bangkok Art Cultural Centre, Pathumwan intersection. An online archive is also available…” The site is in Thai but Google Translate has no problems with it. I enjoyed the art a lot; the only downside is that this site is a bit of a slow load from America.
Nintendo Wire: Online exhibition lets you explore the world of Pokémon Trading Card Game illustrations. “The Pokémon Trading Card Game has been going strong for well over 20 years now and it’s showing no signs of stopping. The illustrations on each card play a large part in the game’s lasting appeal – whether you collect old favorites or seek out Full Art cards, there’s plenty to appreciate. Now a new website has opened up in partnership with Anique that lets you interactively explore the world of Pokémon Trading Card Game illustrations.”
Input: Flickr deleted, and then undeleted, 5 million archival images. “After a Twitter thread by Danish designer Jonas Lönborg brought attention to the heartbreaking erasure, Flickr CEO Don MacAskill responded that Flickr’s recommendation for the Internet Archive to delete the account had been ‘a mistake.’ He explained that the 5 million book images ‘were drowning out the rest of the Commons members’ and announced a new solution: Flickr will restore the account but move it out of the Commons.”
Public Domain Review: 5.2 Million Book Illustrations Deleted from Flickr — Help Get Them Back. “Imagine a corner of the internet, free to all, where you could search, browse, and download from an archive of more than 5 million illustrations extracted from public domain books? And more than that, improve metadata by tagging and commenting, and contribute to findability by favouriting and saving images to your own publicly-accessible galleries? This very special space was the Internet Archive Book Images account on Flickr: The Commons. I write was because a couple of weeks ago it was deleted.”
University of Wyoming: UW Joins Buffalo Bill Center, UK Institutions in Digital Humanities Project . “Researchers at the University of Wyoming and the Buffalo Bill Center of the West have joined international colleagues in Wales in a new project aimed at developing digital tools to analyze historical book illustrations to gain a more thorough understanding of history. Using a nearly $500,000 grant from the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities and the United Kingdom’s Arts and Humanities Research Council, the team will use cutting-edge computing techniques to uncover hidden histories contained in the collections of several cultural institutions.”
KATC: Group gets word out about COVID best practices in Latino community through cartoons, illustrations. “A group is hoping cartoons and illustrations can help spread factual information about COVID-19. Covid Latino teamed up with artists and cartoonists to highlight the importance of getting vaccinated. The group was launched in the spring of 2020 to reach immigrant farming communities. They try to craft information in a way that’s easy to understand and culturally relevant.”
Creative Boom: Dive into Zara Picken’s treasure trove of illustration ephemera from the mid-20th century . “The treasure trove of print, which Zara has titled Ephemerama!, is available for all to see on a dedicated Instagram account. With postal stamps and travel information leaflets, booklets and advertisements, these retro pieces come from anywhere between the 1950s through to the mid-1970s.”
Wildlife Conservation Society: WCS Releases Archive of Stunning, Forgotten Historical Wildlife Illustrations. “The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) released to the public a digital collection of some 2,200 forgotten, historical scientific wildlife illustrations from its Department of Tropical Research (DTR), which it ran from 1916 to 1965. The stunning illustrations include montages of otherworldly deepwater fish, stately portraits of sloths, strange insects, brightly colored birds, snakes, frogs, and other wildlife. Many of the illustrations seem almost whimsical, yet are scientifically accurate.”
Laughing Squid: A Visualization of the Space That Bytes on the Internet Would Occupy in Comparison to Real World Objects. “For example, using this ratio, a 100 MB would be smaller than a typical soda can, while 1 PB (Petabyte) would be taller than the Statue of Liberty. All information on the internet in 2001 would be represented by 1 EB Exabyte and one ZB (Zettabyte) in 2020. 1 YB (Yottabyte) of information would cover the better part of North America.”
Atlas Obscura: See 500 Years of Artful Nature Illustrations. “Now, the collaborative Biodiversity Heritage Library—a digital archive compiled by a consortium of natural-history libraries—has released over 150,000 artworks of the natural world, allowing public access to one of the largest illustrated compendiums of life on Earth. Years before wildlife photographers began to catalogue the world’s egrets, cephalopods, and rafflesia corpse flowers, artists like Elizabeth Gould were portraying species with illustrations, often reprinted as lithographs for the public.”
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.
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