Fun Friday Resources
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In order to STEAL FROM THE BEST, it is sometimes necessary to have resources from which to steal. Here are three I recently came across that offer something different:
Free Vintage Posters is exactly what it says: posters in a variety of categories like Movies, Travel, Food & Drink, etc. All are downloadable. (To be honest, I am not sure how these are not copyrighted, but perhaps as advertising they were not ™'d and ©'d to pieces the way everything is today. Before 1976, you had to proactively label your work as copyrighted and it had to be "published"; it may be that the owners of these posters never bothered to label them.)
So if you need a poster to parody or to deconstruct, or you just need a model to study to create something of your own, give these a whirl. There's a lot of great material here.
At MyMiniFactory's Scan the World, you have access to nearly 8.000 downloadable 3D printable sculptures. That's right, you can download the file and then print your very own David or Wingéd Nike of Samothrace right in the comfort of your maker's studio.
What, you don't have a 3D printer? Neither do I. But I imagine that those who do will find a lot to play with and steal on this site. (They have other libraries too: Props & Cosplay, Toys & Games, etc.)
Think of the possibilities: using the sculptures as pieces in a larger work; messing with the 3D file to give David a different head or a pot belly; combining 3D files for some bizarre chimera.
The site can be slow.
Kitties!
Over at Creative Commons, you can search for images on a universe of topics. Here's one of cats from the Metropolitan Museum.
Read up on Creative Commons and the public domain. It's an important movement dedicated to protecting our common heritage from encroachment by the moneyed interests. (The 1998 Copyright Extension Act is called the Mickey Mouse Protection Act for a reason.)
The whole purpose of copyright is to grant the creator of a work exclusive rights to that work for a limited time, after which it gets dumped into the commons for all of us to use. Copyright was meant to serve three purposes: 1) to provide and protect income for creators for their work; 2) to encourage creators to create new work to replace that which had moved into the public domain (because their work didn't remain in their control forever); 3) to gift the community at large with new sources from which to STEAL.
In other words, it was set up to create a cycle of creativity, a churn of ideas. Current copyright law has tended to squelch that by extending protection to works for 70 years after the creator's death. Remember, kids, corporations are immortal. We are not.
