Category Archives: Visual Research

Hunting down pictures.

Trailer for “The Tale of Despereaux”

Odd, isn’t it, how the marketing of a film involves both the precise identification and targeting of likely audiences, while at the same time trying to maximise its appeal to the broadest possible market. Focusing and defocusing in one go. How wide of the mark this effort can sometimes be.
Now if somebody had [...]

The Perils of Practising Perfect Perspective

(Click to enlarge)
Of course the more perspicacious among you readers of Articles and Texticles will have immediately spotted what the artist is doing wrong in this picture.
That’s right, he’s wearing completely the wrong footwear for the job. He should be wearing very heavy boots so that he can keep his knees down, and support [...]

Speculative Cigar Box Samples

Here is a selection of beautiful samples of the chromolithographic printer’s art, applied to cigar boxes.
They seem to be speculative samples that were sent out to North American cigar packers around 1880 -1910, judging by the costumes.
While it’s fortunate that whoever runs the Brasilian website containing these images has gone to the trouble of collecting [...]

Tavik František Šimon

This is post #5 in this mini series of Yule snow scenes, and today’s artist is T.F.Simon, a prolific painter and printmaker from Czechoslovakia who lived between 1877 and 1942. Today is the first time I’d ever heard of him! I just stumbled onto a website devoted to him, while looking for somebody [...]

Hans Bacher’s Coming Up 502’s and 404’s

I’m getting nothing but server errors and page not founds when trying to connect to Hans Bacher’s swathe of blogs.
Has he had another of his famous hissy fits with Blogger? Will he bounce back with yet another cleverly named blog? I hope so. I’ll let you know if I find anything.
Meanwhile, this [...]

Some Kimono Fabrics

While doing some visual research for an ongoing project, I came across this beautiful group of textile print designs from a photo set on Flickr.

Here’s the Flickr set it forms part of -

There’s a blog called Teatime, that is linked to the set …

… that contains some very lovely vintage illustrations of Japanese and [...]

The New Stream of Consciousness

Well it’s more of a river, really. Its name is play.blogger, although on the web page it clearly says Blogger Play.

(Click on the thumbnails to enlarge them.)
It’s a continuous feed of all the images that are being uploaded to peoples Blogspot blogs (Blogger). The staff at Google have enjoyed watching this stream of [...]

Why I <3 Charley Parker & “Lines + Colors”

Lines and Colors is a continually intriguing doorway into the websites of artists and illustrators, paraded before you in no particular order by Charley Parker.
Use the link on the sidebar to your left or just click here.
Charlie says:
lines and colors is a blog about drawing, sketching, painting, comics, cartoons, webcomics, illustration, digital art, [...]

Caught In The Dragnet

So often, while doing visual research for a job, I’ll be brought to a screeching halt by pictures that, while tangenital to my immediate search, are arresting enough to make me stop and make notes before resuming my searches.
Maybe I’m just easily distracted. Maybe there are many more crazy things in the world than [...]

What’s Wrong With This Picture?

(Click to enlarge)-(and no stupid puns intended.)
I found this arresting image on the amazing Dutch Circus Museum website a while ago. It dates from the 1920’s, I think.
(CAUTION! When you follow that link you will immediately be subjected to irritating and loud announcements in Dutch. There’s a button at top right that turns [...]

Bad Behavior has blocked 5402 access attempts in the last 7 days.