Art of Narrative: June 2011

Friday, June 24, 2011

Harry Clarke - Project Progress

Books digitized to archive text often fail to capture the color and intensity of images. Not having seen them, I can only guess at the true originals, but I have seen enough of Harry Clarke's work accurately reproduced for the printed page, that I feel I have a sense of his color range, and the optimal level of contrast in black and white.

When the project is done I will have every color image and page decoration from a major work, featured here in its entirety. I am starting with washed out, dulled versions of each illustration; and bringing out the playfulness in Harry Clarke's approach, highly stylized and carefully executed, so the figures and the objects dance on the page.

Soon, soon... Right now, I am cropping, resizing, and lightening, among other enhancements; keeping the illustrations in their original order, and labeling with the captions.

Saturday, June 11, 2011

Welcome to the Art of Narrative on Blogger

Welcome to the Art of Narrative on blogger, a companion to my tumblr blog, The Art of Narrative. This new blog allows for information about the artists and their work, and an opportunity for dialogue. I hope you enjoy the illustrations, and I welcome your comments.

I am using this site to post images I have not only located, but worked to improve, by cropping extraneous edges, and optimizing the color and clarity. Most of these images are in the public domain, from books scanned by library or research sites.

I copy images in the highest possible resolution, and I always link to the original source. If I've scanned the image from a book, I include a complete bibliographic citation including the title, author, publisher, and year of publication. Contemporary images obtained through fair use for educational purposes, are linked to information about the artist or illustrator.

If you use an image from this site, please link to the Art of Narrative as your source.

If you are a tumblr user, images from this site are easy to re-blog and credit, because they are already on my tumblr blog, The Art of Narrative.

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Friday, June 10, 2011

Minnie Dibdin Spooner: Illustrations for The Golden Staircase

These illustrations come from an impressive book published in 1906, titled The Golden Staircase: Poems and Verses for Children (G. P. Putnam's Sons), selected by Louey Chisholm, and illustrated by Minnie Dibdin Spooner. There are sixteen illustrations, including the frontispiece, plus the wonderful book cover itself.

I spent approximately eight hours over the course of four or five days copying and working with the images and posting them at my tumblr blog, The Art of Narrative. Work included straightening, cropping, adjusting the color and contrast, resizing the images, and identifying the poem each image illustrates through the volume's index.

Here's a link to the illustrations at my tumblr, The Art of Narrative.

Here's a link to the source of the illustrations at the Internet Archive, where you can read the poems and view the images in their original context.

I could not find a lot of information on Minnie Dibdin Davison Spooner (1867-1949), other than the fact she was a painter, a sculptor, and a designer. This article on her husband, Charles Spooner, a Scottish architect and designer, will give you some background about her.

There is also a brief article on Minnie Dibdin Spooner here, that adds to the information about her credentials, and the work she did with her husband designing, furnishing, and decorating churches.

Click on each image for greater detail.