The medium of the Gelatin Silver Print was developed (no pun intended) in 1873 and was in general use by the 1880s. This type of photographic print is synonymous with what is quintessentially portrayed as black & white…
”He saw the city like an Istanbullu but painted it like a cleareyed Westerner.” -Orhan Pamuk, Memories of the City (2005) This week’s illustration post is certainly the largest item to be featured on this blog series,…
This small sketchbook of around 100 watercolour sketches of St Andrews scenes represents just a tiny fraction of the artistic output of its creator, John Nicol Bonthron. He is thought to have produced around 10,000…
Instead of focusing on a specific medium, this week’s Inspiring Illustrations post on photography is devoted to a well-known presentation format, the stereograph. More recently identified as 3D photography…
This week’s illustration post focuses on perhaps the most popular illustrated genre of the Renaissance: the emblem book. Emblem books were a genre developed in the early 16th century as digestible and curious works…
These beautiful hand-painted pictures of tortoises and turtles were created by Scottish naturalist John Anderson (1833-1900). They feature reptiles found in India, Ceylon and Burma, including the Indian star tortoise,…
A photo-mechanical process based on the principal of oil and water repelling each other, the bromoil print is, loosely speaking, a type of lithography. To start, a gelatin-silver bromide print (explaining the “Brom” in…
As 2013 promises to be an interesting year astronomically and we take to gazing at the stars again, I thought it would be good to turn our focus for this week’s blog to the heavens as well. I began my search for the…
For our New Year post it seems appropriate to look at some quintessentially Scottish images. There are some images of the Scots that we prefer to avoid, however, so rather than look for pictures of drunken parties or…
A very merry Christmas to all of our readers! For this Christmas Eve illustration post we picked a lovely little book from the heart of Victorian London: Thomas Hervey’s The book of Christmas illustrated by Robert…