YOU CAN GET THIS:
FROM THIS:
for free - but... it's not as easy as it looks. First in my favorite graphics program the GIMP (you can use any graphics editor like PhotoShop, GIMP, Elements, Canva etc...) I can cut out, flip it, recolor it, re-size it, duplicate it, add a bird wing and generally clean up the image. Now the cupid image above is copyrighted by me. It's my version. I can use it, give it away, sell it or whatever I want. I can print it off and use it as many times as I want. I can even print multiples on cardstock, cut them out and use foam tape to stick them together to make as many dimensional stickers as I want for my paper projects.
.
RESOURCES
Most all graphic artists have a collection or private "archive" of vintage graphics they use that are pulled from the public domain (and other resources) along with maybe some they've paid for the rights to use from different sources. All graphics in the public domain are royalty and copyright free for use by the general public. You can download them for free and print them out at will. You can keep them digital but if you want to use them on card projects you will need a printer.
It helps greatly if you know what term to search for like Godey's Ladies Books, World of Fashion, Vintage Trade Cards, or just the term 'vintage ephemera' is sometimes enough. You can search on particular artist's names like Ellen Clapsaddle or A. Dreissen and pull up many wonderful postcards, calendars, greeting and trade cards by them. You can learn the history of some of these wonderful artists while you're at it, like the tragic ending of Ellen Clapsaddle's life. She was one of the best card and postcard artists there ever was! You can find out what trade cards were and discover a whole collection of these precursors to modern advertising before television was invented which was simply 'word of mouth' by a simple printed card that you shared and showed to others.
You can get these wonderful vintage works of art by doing research online but I've already done a lot of the work for you below by listing a few good resources. Some resources also offer access to their larger (or re-worked) collection for a fee but all of these provide many graphic sources for free. Your search should include a search of the archives of libraries and museums. Here are a few of my favorite resources:
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
University of Pennsylvania online library
The University of Pennsylvania online library and the Hathi Trust are a list of resources of online collections including Godey's Ladies book illustrations and World of Fashion where you can get vintage women's fashion prints for making your own paper dolls among other graphic resources. You can search for other collections through their search boxes and download copies like this one to work with for free.
Dover publications have sets of books and cd's full of royalty free graphics you can get if you can find them. The best ones I have are not still in print but you might be able to get a good copy on Amazon or Ebay. Make sure the cd is included. You may also be able to find dover clip art books at your local library where they won't cost you anything to copy or use from the prints or included cd.
BUYING PRINT GRAPHICS
You can also buy and pay royalty/usage fees or graphics from other artists who re-do them from the public domain, re-size, re-color, cut out and clean them up for you to add to your own archive. You can print out other paper ephemera including scrapbooking papers online. All you need to know is how to work with graphics, a printer and some hard drive or external disk space for storage. Graphics and graphic formats can get quite large. Most digital artists will have at least one external hard drive where they back up their collection and routinely pull them off on disk storage to save and archive them and to keep them from getting lost during hardware failure. To consider, there are also cloud storage, terabyte and zip drives.
Some people still do search for actual antique postcards and ephemera from other sources (collectors) and collect them from other countries. But the modern world and use of the internet greatly levels the playing field for anyone who wishes to build a digital vintage library or their own archive if they choose to do so.
Do a search on Etsy for vintage printable postcards or other keywords for what you are looking for. You can sometimes find them or links to them on Pinterest. You can see it takes a lot of time to research, collect, organize and re-work these graphics. That's what you are paying for when you buy them from other sellers online or companies where they are already printed.
I've built my own archive of graphic images, patterns and papers from the public domain. I use them a lot in my projects because they make me happy. And they're free so why not?
No comments:
Post a Comment