January 21, 2015

1-21-15

One of my sisters, who lives in Colorado is selling her calligraphy with clip art illustrations to embellish her writing. The problem is that clip art is taken from old prints so they are also royalty free. That a good thing that you don't have to pay the artist for the work because it is so old and they were usually public images. They were used in broadsheets(large scale newspapers) as advertisements or printed informational pamphlets.

Before the printing press, everything was handwritten and often hand drawn.You had to be very rich to own a book. Sometime in the 1600's the printing press was invented and images were reproduced from wood cuts,slabs of wood carved with an image and inked to have paper applied to it to relieve a reverse image.

By the 1800's printing was booming and there emerged a wealthy, well educated middle class, eager for news of the world. Journalism and novels and books became popular and affordable.

The images were now etched onto metal plates to be reproduced for print. The metal plates lasted longer than the wood cuts, but which ever the media, repeated use made the images blurred as the edges of the carvings,or etchings became soft and the ink lines became less crisp.

It is these images, taken from old printed sources that my sister is using for her clip art. She wanted me to enhance then to make them have more depth because they looked so flat. I've attached the original image that she sent to me and if you look at it closely, you can see that the image is very mushy. (1AGREATER CROWN2)

The only way that I could make them better as to redraw them. I did the first one, a crown, sword and an olive branch. I tried to do a tracing in Illustrator, but the image had so many variation of color with in the shapes that it still looked terrible. I had to draw each shape in the image and color them. Because there are created in Illustrator, they are vectors and can be resized to any size without distortion or pixelation. I did two versions, one with lines (1AGREATER-CROWN2-web) and one without lines, but with gradients (1AGREATER-CROWN2-.no-line) These attached images that I had made are compressed so these may look a little textured. I hope that she can use them!