drawing references linkspam

[ratcreature]

This probably is already obvious to anyone not me, but: I was browsing the internet archive for books, and found that they archived some vintage mail order catalogs, which have lots of pictures and illustrations and thus are great for easy to find period references for anything from clothes to carriages, farm equipment and kitchen stuff. Not to mention that it is just kind of cool to look at mail order catalogs from 1900, 1907 or 1920. I had no idea that you could find old catalogs online, but there's all kinds of interesting scanned things with pictures available there, like I found some sort of British government guideline for protective clothing worn by female factory workers in 1917, with photos of what they were wearing.

I also found old course books on fashion drawing and costume design, which look kind of helpful for clueless and fashion-challenged people like me to figure out how clothing more complicated than t-shirts actually fits together, because when I look at pictures of older clothes I often can't figure out the pieces, and old photographs aren't the clearest either. I mean, even drawing contemporary clothing is hard.

I also found this old book on pen drawing with lots of examples for different crosshatching and other b/w inking techniques for illustrations, which I have only skimmed so far, but it looks interesting.

Comments

[madripoor-rose.livejournal.com]

Oh, those catalogs are cool, and I'd never seen them before. Thanks for posting.

Some almost steampunky coats there.

[ratcreature]

They really are. I have looked for fashion from around these periods before (for steampunk inspiration too), but for some reason it never occurred to me to look for scans of old books and catalogs online. I always just tried stuff like google image searches, which weren't that useful.

[jimandblair.livejournal.com]

these are great. They're worth printing out. The line drawing treatise might take a little work to grasp the intricacies of the different types of work, but it looks like fun. Love the fashion drawing book, I can see the immediate application of that. The costume design book illustrations look too low resolution to be really useful, but that might be my monitor.

[ratcreature]

I found it surprisingly hard to find inking tutorials that give more detailed pointers for textures and crosshatching. I mean, learning by trial and error is all well and good, but I'm lazy enough that I prefer explanations and examples for what to try and this has lots of examples from a time when it was important for illustration reproduction I think.

For the costume design one, did you try the PDF or the small flipbook? The flipbook has a lower resolution but the pdf seemed decent. Not super hi-res, but I could make out enough of the pictures of costumes, though many of the illustrations don't seem that large and detailed that you can see every cuff and button, but more about a general style impressions. Mostly the line darawings though, the reprodcutions of the paintings seemed rather useless and low quality.

[gnatkip.livejournal.com]

Oh cool, thanks. I'm skimming over the pen drawing book right now, but I'll keep the others in mind for later. It never occurred to me to look at archive.org for refs.

[ratcreature]

It had never really occurred to me either.

I mean, a while back, when I was looking for steampunk victorian references and inspiration for example I tried google image search to find pictures online, but that wasn't all that great to see details of machinery and such, and photos of industry aren't that common or they don't really show the insides closely, so in the end I got a children's book about technology history. But now I wonder whether for example you could find old public domain books about historical industry or old texts for engineering students or for vocational schools teaching mechanical stuff that have been scanned online that also have contemporary pictures from back then in them.