At the beginning of this month, I had decided that I wanted to do more visual stuff in my notebook. You know, more of those little scribble drawings that I do.

My current notebook is a large, 8x11 (21x27cm) book with unlined pages. I always write a "dedication" on the first page of my notebooks, and for this one it is:

Illustrate

Illuminate

It started out okay, but lately I had been writing pages and pages of words, and had gotten away from my sketches. So, my new goal is to make a drawing or a visual element every time I write.

And to that end, I bought my very first Dover Pictorial Archive books. If you've never heard of Dover, they provide books with copyright-free illustrations... mostly old engravings on which the copyright has run out (I'm pretty sure most of the stuff is 100+ years old).

Anyway. My line of thinking: my drawings from memory sometimes suck. heh. So, I need some practice. I need to draw more things that are right in front of me. But I do my notebooking in my bedroom, and I can only do so many crappy drawings of my box of pens and the guinea pigs and the ficus and the computers. If I had pictures of other stuff to look at, and not have to worry about the copyright (an important issue for me)... well, maybe my notebook will get more interesting.

I've had my Dover books for a couple weeks now, and my conclusion?

I LOVE clip art in books!!! :)

The books I bought:

• Big Book of Animal Illustrations
  10$ for 117 pages of pics. There's a pretty wide variety of animals here. The pics in this book are what I would call "detailed line art". The pics are labled, so I know exactly what kind of tortoise I'm drawing. :)



• Whimsical Animals Illustrations
  10$ for 189 pics on 64 single sided pages, plus the CDROM. Not as many pics as the first book, but you do get the CDROM. These are all cutesy type animal line art and the digital files are just bitmapped, not vectored. So, not as good a deal as the other books I got.



• Plants: 2400 Copyright-Free Illustrations of Flowers, Trees, Fruits and Vegetables
  16$ for 339 pages of pics. Wow, this book is huge! The pics are engravings from the 1800s and are simply beautiful. The plants are arranged by family and the index lists the scientific names of each plant.

And some links to check out:

• Dover Publications store



• Using the Dover Pictorial Archive in Collage and be sure to check out the rest of this site since it has a important discussion about copyright. FunnyStrange.com, Copyright for Collage Artists

Of course, every once in a while life inspires me to scribble. :) This is our bird feeder, as of yesterday morning. Last night, the bird seed was all gone! Basically it took them two days to empty it! Pigs.

Well, that's fine. I'll go buy some more seeds for them. This morning I went out to examine the leftovers. I was pretty sure that the finches weren't eating the sunflower seeds... watching them, it looked like they grabbed a sunflower, gave it a few chomps in their beak and then dropped it.

yep, sure enough, there were quite a few sunflower seeds that hadn't been broken into. Mostly, it was millet shells that were empty. I hope the store sells packages of seed that are mostly millet...