MissMary.com is moving to a new server, so you’ll undoubtedly find broken links while I reconnect everything.

Don’t despair, all will return. If you are looking for clip art, visit the new clip art shop at:

www.digiCRAFTshop.com

Back to work!

Now available for download, but in a new location.

Recently I launched a site for free collage sheets called, what else, FreeCollageSheets.com. The July calendar page and future pages will now be published there, so please take note and as always, sign up for my free newsletter for updates and specials.

Vintage image of Victorian calling card featuring a hand holding a white dove.

I’ve pushed the old gardening information that had been hosted on this site over to a home of it’s own. Head on over to RetroGarden.com to find archived vintage articles about gardening, decorating with flowers, building garden structures, and other floral related topics.

Tags: botanical, decorating, diy, floral, flowers, gardening, vintage

Vintage mythological clip art image of Medusa the Gorgon

Unusual clip art images a specialty. Find mytholocial beasties and characters from legend in the Myths & Monsters clip art category.

I’ve been digitizing the plates from the Ceramique Orientale image portfolio for a few days now, uploading them directly to the clip art store as they are completed and my mind is swimming with ideas!

The idea to apply a kaleidoscopic version of Tile Pattern Page No. 29 to alter the dress on this 19th century antique carte de visite was inspired by Gankutsuou, The Count of Monte Cristo.

Gankutsuou is a feast for the eyes as well as being a very well told tale, actually quite faithful to the original Dumas story in spite of a few radical changes, not the least of those being that our dear Count is blue, with pointed ears and fangs.
The characters clothing and hair is made up of patterns, and as the characters move the patterns do not. It is difficult to describe, so take a look at the trailer at Geneon’s official website for Gankutsuou: The Count of Monte Cristo

Photoshop is my software of choice. The pattern was transformed into repeating pattern using the free Kaleidoscope 2.1 Plugin from Mehdi.

I selected the dress in two sections (the “skirt” and the “bodice”) using the magnetic lasso tool. The tiled pattern was “pasted into” these sections. To age the dress, I chose to re-age the entire photograph using the Old Movie plugin from VanDerLee.

I’ll continue to work on my example image, perhaps keeping some of the color and tinting the photograph more. But for now…back to work on the rest of the tile patterns.

It’s amazing how vivid the original hand-coloring is on these vintage photographic prints of ancient ceramic designs.

As with much of what I digitize for the clip art shop, I am at a loss as to what to do with the originals. Should I frame them? Should I just put them back into storage? Probably the later…they’ll be safer that way, and I can always print out the reproductions and frame them.

More swirling arabesque flowers in these vintage tile designs.

You can see all of the beautiful hand-tinted images from my digitized version of a rare French portfolio here.

An assortment of plates and bowls. A page from a portfolio of Oriental Ceramic Designs. The grape plate is my favorite. Find the downloadable image here.