GENERAL REFERENCE SITES
• Art Daily
Link: www.artdaily.com
The First Art Newspaper on the Net, established in 1996. This fab site also includes info on comics-related exhbitions.

• Artcyclopedia: The Fine Art Search Engine
Web Link: www.artcyclopedia.com
This specialist search engine aims to be a comprehensive index of every artist represented at hundreds of museum sites, image archives, and other online resources. They started out by covering the biggest and best sites around, and have links for most well-known artists to keep you surfing for hours. The compilers have now indexed 1800 art sites, and offer over 60,000 links to an estimated 150,000 artworks by 8,100 renowned artists.

ARTISTS EQUIPMENT
DIP PENS AND NIBS
(thanks to artists Dave Gibbons, Kev Hopgood for some of these)

Akado
• www.akadotretail.com
Stock Gillott nibs

• Hans Presto
hans.presto.tripod.com
This Swedish (with English translation) site apparently stocks and sells just about every dip pen ever made. It also has sections on Lettering, Comics and Handwriting.

Heaton Cooper
• www.heatoncooper.co.uk
Stock Gillott nibs

• www.nibs.tk
Stock Gillott nibs

• www.marcuslink.com/pens/link1.html

Scribblers
• www.scribblers.co.uk/acatalog/Copperplate_Nibs.html

ART GALLERIES ONLINE
See also photography
• The Art Renewal Center
Link: www.artrenewal.com
Perhaps the largest on-line Museum on the internet. A work in progress, steadily expanding with thousands of high quality images of the greatest paintings and sculpture in history, the Art Renewal Center is building an encyclopedic collection of essays, biographies and articles by top scholars in the field.
ARC is described by its makers as "the Eye of the Storm, at the core, hub and centre of a major cultural shift in the art world. With a growing body of experts, we are setting standards of ARC Approval for artists, art schools, systems of training, museum exhibitions and historical scholarship, to bring guidance, direction, goals and reality to an art establishment that has been sailing rudderless for nearly a hundred years."

BITS AND PIECES
• Flags of the World
Link: www.crwflags.com/fotw/flags/iso3166.html
Every flag in the world is displayed here.

• The Imaginary World
Link: theimaginaryworld.com
This is an impressive site, packed with imagery from advertising - largely US -- including cereal boxes covers, bubble gum cards etc. great for reference if you're doing anything historical in a comic strip, perhaps.

• The Scrap Album
I came across this site while looking for stuff for collages. It's a terrific resource for anyone interested in the development of the greeting card and Victoriania, with beautiful illustrations from the period.

MATCH BOOKS
• For Our Matchless Friends
Useful reference for artists and a testament to a tradition of complimentary matchbooks, now fading as smoking in public becomes sidelined and vilified. Which is very annoying for cigar smokers like Carlos Ezquerra, let me tell you!

LITERATURE
• Author Anniversaries
Handy site -- if you're thinking of adapting an old story for another medium and want to find out if it's out of copyright this could help you... This site includes the New General Catalog of Old Books and Authors pages, which contain a list of old authors and the titles of some of their books, and where to find several thousand of those books online on the Internet.

• Today in Literature
A calendar of engaging stories about the great books, writers, and events in literary history.

• World Wide Words
All the pieces on this site from researcher Michael Quinion are about English words and phrases -- what they mean, where they came from, how they have evolved, and the ways in which people sometimes misuse them.
They appeared first in the free newsletter that he sends out by e-mail every Saturday to 17,000+ subscribers worldwide.

• The Internet Archive: Million Book Project
Pioneered by Jaime Carbonell, Raj Reddy, Michael Shamos, Gloriana St Clair, and Robert Thibadeau of Carnegie Mellon University, the goal of The Million Book Project is to digitize a million books by 2005. The task will be accomplished by scanning the books and indexing their full text with OCR technology. The undertaking will create a free-to-read, searchable digital library the approximate size of the combined libraries at Carnegie Mellon University, and one much bigger than the holdings of any high school library. The pilot Thousand Book Project has already been successfully completed and can be accessed here.

• The Internet Archive: Children's Library
The Internet Archive Children's Library includes all of the books from the International Children’s Digital Library (ICDL), a project developed by the Internet Archive and the University of Maryland, which provides a prestigious collection of international literature for children around the world. The primary purpose of the library is to provide access to literature that can enable children to understand the world around them and the global society in which they live. The materials included in the collection reflect similarities and differences in cultures, societies, interests, lifestyles, aspirations, and priorities of peoples around the world. Its primary audiences are children ages 3-13, librarians, teachers, parents, caregivers, and others concerned with the interests and welfare of children. This collection also contains further children's books unavailable via the ICDL.

PHOTOGRAPHY
• Chronophotographical Projections
(Sourced via Kenradio): Long before computer graphics and blockbuster special effects dominated movie making, early shutterbugs simply wanted to figure out how to make still pictures move. You're invited to explore a pivotal era in photo history that lies somewhere between filmmaking and still photography. Known as chronophotography, this technique was devised in the late 19th century. An interplay of ultra-fast shutter speeds, film plates, and technical savvy are used to create sequential snippets of everyday life. Some of the first moving pictures included galloping horses and other animals in motion, and people moving in odd postures. While today all this may look primitive, it was just the beginning of things to come. Curious experiments in work, rest, and play and splashing objects were necessary steps on the long road to spectacular 21st century filmmaking.

• Edward Burtynsky
Link: www.edwardburtynsky.com
Nature transformed through industry is a predominant theme in Burtynsky's stunning work. "I set course to intersect with a contemporary view of the great ages of man; from stone, to minerals, oil, transportation, silicon, and so on. To make these ideas visible I search for subjects that are rich in detail and scale yet open in their meaning. Recycling yards, mine tailings, quarries and refineries are all places that are outside of our normal experience, yet we partake of their output on a daily basis... For me, these images function as reflecting pools of our times."

• The Long View
(Sourced via Kenradio): Taking the Long View Since the early days of photography, the sweeping beauty of panoramic images have mesmerized us. Expansive vistas and sprawling cityscapes seem to be the perfect subjects for this long, narrow format. Sit back and enjoy this Library of Congress collection containing some 4,000 images taken from 1851 to 1991, featuring all 50 U.S. states and more than 20 countries. Start with a brief history of panoramic photography, and learn how they're shot, developed, and printed today. Because of their unique format, these photos can show changes in a city over time and uniquely chronicle disasters such as floods and earthquakes in great detail. The wonders of nature in Yosemite, Lake Tahoe, the Grand Canyon, and Mt. Rainier seem larger than life. While early 20th-century pictures of Naples, Seattle, Paris, Belize, Montgomery, and New York City offer a wide window to a bygone world.

• Enchanted Ceiling
Stunning images of the sky from around the world. The concept for Enchanted Ceiling was inspired by J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series (which site creator David Huyck says he is addicted to). In the stories, the ceiling of the great hall at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry is enchanted to reflect the weather outside the castle. David imagined a site where you could enter your zip code, and the site would read your local weather conditions and adapt the look of the site to look like the sky above you. A few things helped me develop the idea further.

The New York Public Library
Link: http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/index.cfm
The New York Public Library has launched an online gallery containing over 275,000 images from its collection, offering free downloads of images such as 16th century maps, Depression-era photography and rare illustrated books by writers like William Blake. The library says it will update the archive monthly and plans to eventually offer 500,000 items.

Old UK Photos
Link: www.oldukphotos.com
Started in June 2006, this non commercial site site features old photographs of the United Kingdom from the 1890’s right through to the 1960’s. The webmaster, Phil Evans, hopes it may well grow into one of the UK’s largest photographic sites.

POSTCARDS
I'm a bit of a postcard collector but some people have the hobby down to an art form. One site I came across is Disneyland Postcards, which is an incredible retrospective of the famus resort. While not a huge Disney fan myself, this site is interesting in a cultural context and just for the sheer fun of seeing how the place has eveolved down the years. Old UK Photos also features old postcard images from all over the country.

StickerNation
Found via KenRadio: The art of leaving a mark on a surface continues to evolve. Graffiti and tagging are frowned upon, yet they often turn dreary walls and trains into covert and vivid street art. This site focuses on what happens when the nozzle runs dry and artists turn their attention to the humble sticker. However, you won't see any old bumper sticker at this exhibition. Instead, you'll find photos of amazing stickers featuring oddly shaped bodies, bold political statements, and ideas difficult to classify. Along with more than 2,000 photos of adhesive artworks from around the world, you'll find features on the folks who create them. In this form of urban art, any surface is a target for these sneaky stickers -- they pop up where you least expect them. The ultimate in web site "stickiness," this destination will keep you clicking for hours.

SUBVERTS
Subvertise.org
Produced by art collective Gaffers, this is a greection of "subverts" -- mimicingthe look and feel of the targeted ad, and promoting the classic 'double take' as viewers suddenly realise they have been duped.
There's a magazine called AdBusters which is also worth looking out for in this context.

Other pages in this section:

• Illustrators
• Maritime Museums
• Poster Sites

See also:
• Comic Book Artists

• About John Freeman | Site Map | Contact Us | Discuss British Comics

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