Sunflowers

I'm making a card for my daughter's friend. Her favorite flowers are Sunflowers. So I got these vintage sunflowers online from a well known archive.

I cleaned them up a bit and resized them. Then I printed them out for the card I'm making. This is one of them. Aren't they pretty?

You can find a few of the original copyright free, high resolution sunflowers and other flower graphics and more at thegraphicsfairy.com . Just download them and clean them up and make them your own so you can print them out in a higher resolution than it shows here.

Web graphics are low grade and not good to print out. Print graphics are much larger in size so they can print out sharp.

I take copyright free and public domain (free) graphics and clean them up. Then I make a sheet out of them to print out for my own use. Here's a free page you can print and cut out for your own use. Enjoy these beautiful sunflowers!

Dapper Dandies

I am enamoured with the little vintage Godey, World of Fashion and LaMode fashion plates from the Lady's magazines from the 1800's. Anna Griffin's paper dolls got me started on tracking these little people down. I not only have a whole collection of my own now but I'm adding to my own growing vintage archives.

There are a bazillion of these out there that are royalty and copyright free so anyone can go get them and clean them up and make their own version. You just have to know how to work with a graphics program like PhotoShop or the GIMP. You can re-color, re-size, pose and re-create them to suit yourself as you please.

I don't make mine into paper dolls but I do clean them up and manipulate the dresses sometimes to make a whole dress where parts are missing or brighten the graphics up a lot, re-draw or recolor them. And I was delighted to find the fashion plates with dapper dandies in them. They are used as a prop to really showcase the ladies fashions in most of the ladies magazines but the men had their fashion style too so there are tons of fashion plates of just mens fashion. So there aren't as many of them as there are the ladies but I managed to find about half a dozen or so but I'm still finding more of them too. The trick to printing them off clean and sharp is to get them in high resolution and remove the background.

I found one that even has a dog! I love them and now I can make my cards with men and women saying snarky things - or sweet things. Can you imagine an anniversary card for someone made of these? Take the cane out of this one's hand and put a rose in it. He could be proposing or saying something sweet. I love them and I'll be making more cards inspired by these fashion plate dapper dandies from the 1800's! NOW IT'S A PARTY!

More Easel Cards

Another beautiful easel card.

How To Collect and Store Your Graphic Collection

You need a library of graphic resources if you are going to work with the paper arts. The first thing you will need to do is organize your collection so you can get to it at will for any project. I have had two external hard drives for storing my graphic collection for years. Occasionally you will want to move them over to DVD for safekeeping.

I hate to tell you but hardware failure is imminent. Your computer will crash and die some day and it will take all of your graphics with it if you don't back them up. It's not "IF" it will happen... it's "WHEN" it will happen so be prepared. Get used to saving them on to an external hard drive.

An external hard drive doesn't usually go through the same wear and tear as a computer does so it should last longer but be sure to back those graphics up just the same.

You can also keep a printed record of your graphics so if you have to, you can scan them back in but you really want the originals in a lossless format like .png, .tiff or an editable format like a .psd or .xcf for the GIMP. Lossy formats will degrade with each edit or save. That's why .jpeg is not a good format to work with original graphics unless you are making them just for the web where you can compress them in size for quick download where print quality is not important.


FREE GRAPHIC PROGRAM

What's the GIMP? It's the Linux version of the equivalent to PhotoShop. Since it's open source software, it's FREE and you can go get it right now if you plan to work with graphics to make your own stash. There is a version that will work on Windows too. It will do everything PhotoShop will do and then some. Like PhotoShop, it also has a steep learning curve so play with it often until you learn how to manipulate graphics. You will use it to clean up old graphics you download for free that are in the public domain. Then you will want to print them off for your own use.


FREE GRAPHICS

Public domain graphics have no copyright restrictions so anyone can use and re-use them in any art project free of charge. One good source for quality vintage graphics with no copyright restrictions is thegraphicsfairy.com and start your own collection. They have free resources or you can buy a membership.

There are many free graphic resources on the web. Do some research for free vintage clip art. Search online libraries too. Search old books of Dover clip art libraries for vintage stuff too. Some of these are not free but many are if you just look, you can find them too.