Relic on the Lethe

I slipped one last Halloween-adjacent pack into the shop this week! This is predominantly a simple line art pack, with many images pulled from an image scavenger hunt page for children circa 1919.  A divider bar from the pack, featuring three black cats and mice. This pack also includes of my favorite full page magazine covers I had seen from The Pacific Printer, a trade magazine for printers, publishers, and editors. Their November 1916 edition featured very organic, almost psychedelic pumpkins. I have removed the text, so now the page is more adaptable - it would be a fun greeting card cover or one-page invitation form, especially when paired with an Art Nouveau or 1960s style sinuous font. A completed teaser image for this pack, featuring a frog, rat, two spiderwebs, and a gnome tickling the leaves off a tree.   You can snag your pack at Ko-fi starting at $2!

While I missed Canada's Thanksgiving this year, this next pack of 20 PNGs should give the US friends plenty of time to design invitations, place settings, or greeting cards. A turkey bears an invitation to Thanksgiving, suggested as a place card for the Thanksgiving table, circa 1919. This batch is a mixed bag from different artists and time periods, and even publications. The oldest images are circa 1869, sourced from newspaper "specimen books" to show off typefaces and ornaments. About half of the images are from homemaking magazines like Good Housekeeping, either as illustrations to stories or as divider bars or section titles. The three hand-lettered versions of the word "Thanksgiving" were all part of a school workbook, showing examples of classroom activities around 1920. A few images in this batch were even sourced from a sales book for pottery! I selected this batch to focus more on the people, food and cooking aspects of Thanksgiving; if this doesn'...

Long time no post! I've been busy on the art side of things this summer, and after getting burned out on researching the Little family, I decided to revive one of the things I love doing this fall: harvesting art that's fallen into the public domain and sharing it. Like my previous clip art post , I'm happy to share a new batch of images sourced from several magazines around 1919 to 1921. This set primarily features "grotesques" designed by Louise D. Tessin for use on "Hallowe'en programs and invitations." While there was a high focus on black cats and owls, it also contains witches, a dog, a moon, jack-o'-lanterns, and a grumpy person shooing away bats. A sample of the basic art in the pack with some minor edits to repair a malformed face. Her ink and watercolor art was printed in grayscale with some heavy paper textures, an inconsistently-lit scan, and a few original images show errors we'd likely think of as "AI problems" - six ...