Wednesday, October 07, 2009

Weird Islands

Those are the distributors of water - Weird Islands



Big pelican, whose head was almost human - Weird Islands



The pigwing - Weird Islands



Cod - Weird Islands



Their red eyes shone like fire - Weird Islands



To throw stones at them - Weird Islands




The Carpenter - Weird Islands



His saw passed through the hoof without leaving a trace - Weird Islands



His first music lesson - Weird Islands



Peter - Weird Islands



Melinda stopped crying and laughed for joy - Weird Islands



Hoisting themselves on stilts - Weird Islands

[stilts!]



Little horn of leaves which covered their faces - Weird Islands



A girl young and pretty - Weird Islands



The foremost chariot - Weird Islands



All that could be - Weird Islands



Lovely insects - Weird Islands

{click through for modest enlargements; the images were extracted from a pdf and most were background cleaned to one extent or another; mouseover for image titles}


Mad Art Nouveau fantasy illustrations by the Belgian artist, Jean de Bosschère, from his 1921 book, 'Weird Islands', available from the Internet Archive in various formats. (Thanks Jake!!)

Jean de Bosschère at Amazon


As a note (mostly) to myself: If you have an illustrated pdf and you want to take off jpeg images, you should test out the resolution quality by cranking up the display % above 100%. (I have seen some retain integrity/quality up to 300%) But if you do that, you are best off taking a screencap rather than using the page image capture system from the pdf program camera icon in the toolbar. You may think you are capturing an image at 150%, but the cam-icon extracted jpegs turn out to be 100%. Got it? [As a subsequent thought: this might only apply to the Foxit pdf program]


****You can now follow me on twitter :::  @peacayfeeds (UPDATE 2012: not used any more) ::: I recently started a new account [now the MAIN one] -- in addition to the rss-esque twitter feed for ::: @BibliOdyssey -- which ports over the shared feeds from googlereader plus [which includes BibliOdyssey blog posts PLUS] anything else of interest in the (visual) realm of art, science, history, literature, digital archives, library and museum exhibitions &c.

8 comments :

Mr. Bluehaunt said...

Right after I saw this, I bought an original copy online...I had to have it!
The images are really amazing. Thanks for posting.

costanza said...

ohhh... sono bellissime!

Kittybriton said...

I only learned this recently, but will pass it along for anyone else who can make use of it: JPEG images work best for continuous tone, since the compression algorithm "loses" some of the data. If an image is saved to JPEG from JPEG more than once, like a photocopy of a photocopy, the loss starts to become noticeable. I am advised that for lossless copying, TIFF or PNG are preferable.

peacay said...

Yeah, jpegs are a bit like mp3s in that regard. But jpg is the best for those of us who have to be aware of our bandwidth. Despite doing this *thing* that I do for a few years, I still have only a very thin understanding of the practicalities of image formats (and the consequences of changing from one to another) - it's all really fierce mathematics.

I decided quite a while ago to stop worrying too much about the mechanics -- even in terms of the dpi resolution -- and rely on good old eyesight to judge image quality. It seems to be fairly reliable for web presentation/display but I don't know that it would convert so well necessarily to a printed image.

mojadopapel said...

Sencillamente...alucinante.

Anonymous said...

WHERE DO YOU FIND ALL THIS STUFF? These are brilliant. I want to make enlarged prints of all of them and just cover a wall. Or make a mobile. Or both.

Karla said...

Those are decidedly bizarre. Beardsleyesque in some cases, almost 60s-hippie-chick in others. I'm not sure whether the third critter down looks more like a fetus, a dog, or a butterfly.

They also remind me a bit of that disputed bookplate you posted some months back... for which, incidentally, I've uncovered the artist and have to read through a batch of Czech to finish the write-up we-all began on the thing. (I say as co-author periodically prods me longdistance-like.)

harps said...

Very reminiscent of Beardsley....its like Beardsley plus Alice in Wonderland

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