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remittancegirl

remittance girl
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remittancegirl

Playing with Fate: Scanning Idiosyncracies

2 min read
I stumbled on a vast richness of beautiful vintage source material for early 20th Century Japanese brushes and came across two compiled volumes of a Japanese art and design magazine called Shin-Bijutsukai. Basically, it was a magazine that featured nothing but different artist's illustration work.  You can find the scans here: www.archive.org/details/Shinbi… . All the material is public domain as they were published in 1901.

What was interesting was the scan technique. When I used Adobe Acrobat Pro to extract the images and left the setting as 'export to tiff' by mistake, it gave me two files for each scanned page - one containing mostly fields of colour, and the other giving me the clean dark outlines. The colour layer file was much lower res and quite lossy, but the line art layer was almost 580 dpi and very crisp and clean.

I gave a little thought to this and did some experimentation, and realized I could create brushes from this - a kind of a/b pair set that would overlay each other and allow for a beautiful two layer brush stamp.

I remember in the 80's hearing someone talk about the idea of using feedback (an accidental byproduct of amplified sound) as a texture in itself. This was a little the same. The idiosyncrasies of the scanning method, the compression strategies, and the strange way that Acrobat extracts images have resulted in some beautiful design possibilities.

So, I made two sets your delectation:




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remittancegirl

Commercial Usage of My Brushes

2 min read
As you can see, my brushes are covered by a Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial  Share-and-Share Alike license.  However, enough people have now contacted me about commercial use of my brushes that I thought I'd better make a statement about it.

If you would like to use my brushes for commercial purposes or in commercial work, please contact me directly and ask. I do allow commercial use, but it is on a case by case basis. I care about the context in which my brushes are shown and used. So please ask.

Also, if I do allow you to use my brushes on commercial work, I ask you to make a small donation to the non-religious charity of your choice. This doesn't have to be a large donation and I don't require proof of it - just a promise on your honour that you will. I like to do my part to encourage a culture of compassion.

If you feel that this is unreasonable, then, since all my brushes are derived from pre-1920s sources, it is perfectly feasible for you to find the source images from which the brushes where derived. In fact, I sometimes give a link to the actual online source on the brush page.
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remittancegirl

My Cigarette Card Beauties Brush

2 min read
If you are wondering where it went, this is what I received in my inbox this morning:

"Deleted due to Copyright Violation

The work(s) listed below have been removed by staff as a violation of the deviantART copyright policy. Your deviantART submissions must consist entirely of your own work or valid stock resources and must not include works from copyrighted sources.

Please read our Copyright Policy and if you have any questions or believe this removal to be an error please contact the deviantART Help Desk"

As the images from which this brush was derived from were cigarette card photos published in 1886, the source images are well, WELL, in the public domain, as is ALMOST ALL material published before 1923.

It irks me to be accused of copyright infringement and not be given the opportunity to defend myself.

I realize that many servers like DevArts are running scared and simply covering their asses but at the same time, no one likes being accused of something they haven't done.

So...no more brushes here. I'll post them on my own blog from now on.
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remittancegirl

Old things

2 min read


If you've spent any time going through my gallery, you've probably started to figure out that I don't quite live in the present day.

Sure, I'm technologically skilled, but my heart doesn't really reside in the 21st Century, or, for that matter, even the 20th.

Maybe it is because my father was an antiquarian, or because I grew up tagging along behind him through the markets of old European cities hunting for something of beauty amongst the detritus of human social existence.

Maybe it's just because, after spending so many hours cropping botanical illustrations away from stained, torn, grimy old pages, I've come to find a great deal of beauty in the pages themselves.

Whatever the reason, I love old things and especially old books. I love the way they feel, and smell. I love all the different colours the pages turn as they age. I love the ghosts that have left their marks, their scribbles, their dirty fingerprints and the soot from their fireplaces. I feel, somehow, connected to everyone who has ever looked through an old book. I believe that somehow we are connected through our love of knowledge and our belief that we are, we must be, more civilized because we choose to collect, preserve and document what we find in the world and amongst each other.

I hope you enjoy my brushes for making things look old, and the tutorial on how to age documents. If you use them, have a thought for all the people whose lives touched the same piece of data you are touching now in digital form. The writers, the illustrators, the paper makers, the book binders, the printers, the typesetters, and last but not least, the readers.

I do believe we are a noble breed. remittancegirl.deviantart.com/…

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Devious Journal Entry by remittancegirl, journal

Commercial Usage of My Brushes by remittancegirl, journal

My Cigarette Card Beauties Brush by remittancegirl, journal

Old things by remittancegirl, journal

Walter Hood Fitch by remittancegirl, journal