I love drawing inspiration from art, looking at the world’s the artists created and finding my own stories from them.
I’ve been searching for a ‘storehouse’ of classic and modern art that I could easiy browse to find inspiration and came across the artuk website, which contains over 200,000 pictures to browse through.
Take the image above, the odd placement of the bird’s head, how it’s isolated from the rest of its body so it looks like an abstract, alien creature. And consider the odd pairing of the head with the square of scrubby grassland. I look at it and start asking questions about how the two images are related, what assumptions can we make about that world. And from those questions stories and characters can arise.
There’s a person in the woodland on the right. Did you spot her?
Here are some other libraries I like to peruse from time to time:
– https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/rijksstudio
– https://www.flickr.com/photos/nationalarchives/albums
– https://www.flickr.com/photos/biodivlibrary/albums/
– https://www.flickr.com/photos/britishlibrary/albums
There are loads more to be found here: http://www.openculture.com/. Scroll down to the menu section on the right under “Free Art & Images”.
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No! You obviously have a bigger screen than I do! Or better eyesight! Thanks for the links, I will check them out tonight. I use Flickr quite a lot, love some of the vintage photo collections on there for inspiration, it’s actually where I got my idea for the book I’m currently working on!
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