Fun Friday Resources
/More collections to explore!
April Calendar Page; Hawking; Taurus, early 16th century
The Getty Museum has nearly 90,000 images online for you to explore and use. Here you see a page from a Book of Hours, the April calendar page, chosen because it has my astrological sign even though I was born in May. And that’s just from scrolling the opening page. Search will produce more useful results, of course.
The University of Michigan Library provides us with John James Audubon’s Birds of America and The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America which is worth it for the title alone. (It’s biology talk for “four-legged animals what give live birth to babbies.”)
I think from a STEAL FROM THE BEST perspective, these plates could provide valuable instruction since they were all hand-colored: you could literally go get an “adult Audubon coloring book” and replicate the techniques that the original watercolorists used.
Finally, an astounding online library of cocktail/bartending books from the 1820s on, the EUVS Digital Collection. Over at my personal blog, Dale Says, I have a series of posts where I play a kind of game: 1) select a random cocktail from 1930’s Savoy Cocktail Book; 2) make it and judge it; 3) if it’s unacceptable, try to alter the recipe in some way so that it’s palatable and, if unsuccessful, throw it in the sink; 4) keep score. Who knows what gems and/or wastes-of-perfectly-good-gin we can find if we keep digging?
