vince’s ear

One look at one of Sidney’s Sime’s wonderful illustrations and I was intrigued. His fantastical imagery is superb enough to adequately complement the writings of any great author.

Hailing from England, Sidney Sime lived and worked in the Golden Age of Illustration along with other illustrator greats as Sir John Tenniel and Edmund Dulac. He was even born in the same year as the legendary Arthur Rackham. Educated at the Liverpool School of Art, Sime illustrated for such humourous London magazines as Pick-Me-Up and later for the more prestigious Pall Mall and The Idler. He even purchased and co-edited The Idler after a rich uncle left him a sizable fortune.

In just under two years, however, The Idler went out of business. But, with the help of his dead uncle’s estate, the illustrator still had no troubles staying financially afloat himself. Without the need to work, he found the time to work on his illustrations with an ever enhanced fervor.

Though magazine work was his forte, Sime would catch the eye of a certain up and coming Irish aristocrat author. Lord Dunsany at the time was only 26 years old and was working on The Gods of Pegana, and knew of only one illustrator alive who could possibly complete the task of effectively illustrating the work. Lord Dunsany approached the artist and eight plates were completed for the book, which was published a year later. This started a fifteen year collaboration between the two.

Lord Dunsany was so impressed with the illustrations he would eventually write an entire book based on the Sime artworks called the Book of Wonder. Besides providing frontispieces for two other books, Dunsany’s were the only books Sime illustrated. When Sidney Sime died in 1941, his works were left to his wife who later created a memorial in Surrey, England.

I can’t get enough of illustration. I hope you’re getting your fill too, you can read the other posts Illustration and the Illustrations of Edmund Dulac (check it out). You don’t have to take my word for it; there are oodles of illustration resources at your fingertips. I’ve been getting into the public domain for some time now, and it’s absolutely filled with images of all kinds for you to use any way you see fit. Of course I have the responsibility to tell you to make sure any images you use, (outside of “fair use,” i.e.- viewing, or teaching about) you have the right to (copyrights, and so forth- depending on where you live).

Now, the internet being a reference source is akin to taking a card catalog and throwing all the cards on the floor for you to sift through. If you’re not sure exactly what you’re looking for, it’s not so easy to find it! Know what I mean? Luckily there are organizations who take the time to categorize and showcase the public domain material for you.

If you’re not looking for anything in particular (and have the idle time to browse), a good source is wikipedia. I call it “the people’s encyclopedia:” by users, for users. Most of the images they use are already in the PD. If you go to their images in the public domain database you’ll find thousands of images in alphabetical order from everything from photographs to maps to illustrations. That’s where I ran into Edmund Dulac. So you can find book illustrations and artwork of all kinds in there.

You can just google “illustrations in the public domain” or look in wikipedia if that’s what you’re looking for. But you have some better options. One of my recent discoveries is a site called Old Book Illustrations. The name says it all, and its loaded with illustrations and most importantly information on them. One of the drawbacks to using wikipedia or other databases is you rarely are given much information on the image in question. You may find a decent picture, but it may not even tell you the author or artist, let alone explain what’s going on in the picture.

Old Book Illustrations takes care of the misinformation for you. They have a running blog that seems to keep updated several times a week with a new entries on seemingly random illustrations. The illustrations come from books of all kinds such as old encyclopedias, to science and technology journals (pretty comical way back then), and fiction and non-fiction alike. The blog entries will show the image, and give either an explanation of it or an entry from the original book. I like this one about a Monkey and a Miser, from “La Fontaine’s Fables.”

Another great source for books is Project Gutenberg. This database is filled with thousands of books belonging in the public domain available for download in a zip file, or html, or you can just read it on your screen right then and there. I’ve stumbled across plenty of nicely illustrated classics there with all original illustrations. You can find Aesop’s Fables, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and whatever else you want to find, I’m sure it’s there.

Maybe these resources can help you find some decent illustrations. Happy hunting.

Technorati Tags: illustration, illustrator, john tenniel, edmund dulac

Surfing the image archives in the Public Domain can be very tedious and uneventful. Mostly you find pictures of people long dead and forgotten, some famous but you probably wouldn’t read about anyway, and a lot of obsolete maps and whatnot. But after a while you’re bound to strike oil, and struck I did in the form of Edmund Dulac. I came across a good dozen or so images of his illustrations and I was enthralled to say the least.

I don’t recall ever hearing about him before but looking at his pictures they struck as very familiar. Had I known about him before I would have included him in my post about Illustration in general. The pictures remind me of some well illustrated books I remember reading as a child. Come to think of it, he very well could have graced the pages of my bedtime stories.

Edmund Dulac was born in France in 1882 and was popular during the “Golden Age of Illustration” of the early 20th century. Some illustrator greats of that era were Sir John Tenniel , Howard Pyle, Beatrix Potter and others. Akin to such artists as Wassily Kandinsky later on, he started studying law before eventually getting bored with it and turning to art. Winning prizes for art competitions early in his career certainly motivated him to pursue what he truly wanted to do. When he was 22 he was commissioned to illustrate the books of the Brontë sisters. This would start a prolific and successful career.

He went on to partner with galleries to illustrate books and sell the paintings out of the gallery. Some books from this arrangement were stories from the Arabian Nights, Sleeping Beauty, and the Poems of Edgar Allen Poe. The illustration above was from a story I remember called The Princess and the Pea by Hans Christian Anderson, where a pea was under all those mattresses and she could still feel it, proving she was indeed a true princess.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words and I think illustrations like these add value a thousand-fold to each story. At the end of this post I’ve added a link to the other illustration images. Some of the others include “The Mermaid,” “The Garden of Paradise,” and “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” and are definitely worth checking out.

My recent interest in illustration goes hand in hand with my personal goal of illustrating some of the classic books in the public domain. I plan on attempting a shot at illustrating “Alice’s Adventure’s In Wonderland,” and “Aesop’s Fables” among other things. I just recently picked up a pen for the first time in a while; I’ve mainly been using the brush for the most part recently when at all. So, we’ll see how they turn out.

Although, my most likely method would be to actually paint the illustrations on canvas as many illustrators do, and scan the canvases as needed, to make prints or to resize. I’ll keep you informed of my progress.

Also see Illustration

Image Gallery at Wikipedia of Edmund Dulac

Technorati Tags: illustration, illustrator, art