Ping!

Been making a lot of PNGs lately for a couple of sheets I'm working on. This very Victorian design got the PNG treatment today. I've got a bunch of them and may do a collection for the shop, but was so pleased with how this one turned out that I'm posting it here. Its outside dimensions are roughly 5" x 7" with an opening a little over 3" x 5.5", if I remember right; but since it's a PNG you can put an image behind it and it'll show through the lacy pattern, an effect I love.

All images are high resolution and free for your use. Please don't add them to digital collections for resale. Click below to visit my shop!

Dawn of a New Day

Well that didn't take long. RCN cocked things up worse than ever  - a whole week with only a few hours total connection time. They left me no choice. Here's to the start of what I hope will be a bright future with a new provider.

All images are high resolution and free for your use. Please don't add them to digital collections for resale. Click below to visit my shop!

The ABCs of RCN

My internet provider is RCN.  As their longtime customer I've enjoyed about seven years of fairly reliable service, and a couple of months of pure suck from hell. I won't go into details - the hours of tech phone support, the days spent waiting for tech appointments, the cumulative weeks of downtime....the conflicting explanations I've received that boil down to "we can't figure it out"...

The important thing is, I'm online now. And if I lose my connection again anytime soon, I have a new provider all lined up.

Deep breath.

To celebrate my return, here's a nice old farmland alphabet for English children published in the 1860s. I'm posting them pretty large so you can trim away the accompanying verses and still have good-sized images, or leave them intact for cards, banners, fabric design or any kind of crafting you like. There's a separate illustration for each letter except J and U, which weren't included for some reason, and a couple of nice pictures of children reading.

All images are high resolution and free for your use. Please don't add them to digital collections for resale. 

If you like this blog please share the url, and visit my shop: http://www.etsy.com/shop/ValentineGrimm

All images are high resolution and free for your use. Please don't add them to digital collections for resale. Click below to visit my shop!

Groovy Baby

If you've visited my Etsy shop, you may have seen the digital collections of antique marbled papers that I first listed last year. Since then I've found some papers that are so unique that I'm amazed they were created in the 1870s. Their undulating patterns and electric colors remind me of the psychedelic 1960s. Here are just a few examples of the beautiful papers that I'll be using in soon-to-be-listed sheets.

All images are high resolution and free for your use. Please don't add them to digital collections for resale. Click below to visit my shop!

Cats or Dogs?

I'll be listing some of each pretty soon...

All images are high resolution and free for your use. Please don't add them to digital collections for resale. Click below to visit my shop!

Grimm Valentines

It's not Valentine's Day any longer, I know. And even if I'd posted them yesterday, it would have been far too late to use them for Valentines. I know, I know! But now you'll be totally ahead of the game for next year. Maybe. You may not consider these hearts very Valentine-y material, unless you're like me.

But I'm sure you'll find some kind of use for them. There are two anatomical hearts and two emblematic heart designs. Emblems were once a popular way to express moral and ethical abstractions, providing readers with illustrations that helped bring concepts to life.

The two emblems here date from around the 16th century. Even freed of their original context they still carry meaning that makes sense today. The first emblems shows a heart filled with the mechanisms of a clock. Perhaps it's meant to describe the regulation of divine love on the actions of man, but these days it could be taken to mean a false or artificial kind of love (like in the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale about the Emperor's Nightingale, a bejeweled mechanical bird that the emperor comes to favor over the real thing).

I thought I had the second emblem all figured out as being about transformative love, because of the butterfly feeding on the blood of the heart (butterflies being a symbol for the soul and an emblem for transformation) and the young bird awaiting the meal its parent provides by piercing its own breast with its beak. But then I realized that the main illustration, with skeletons standing on either side of a heart, is really of an hourglass. So I got no clue.

But even without any interpretation, it's just cool to have hearts flanked by skeletons and wild things feasting on human blood. Grimm Valentines!

All images are high resolution and free for your use. Please don't add them to digital collections for resale. Click below to visit my shop!

Happy New Super Bowl, or something

Very late for a New Year's post, but exceedingly early to wish you Happy 2013. Yay! Whee! Wow what a year 2012 was, eh? Now that the spaceships have landed and voting has been banned by The One Whose Name Cannot Be Spoken (by human tongues, anyway), it sure leaves a lot more time for reality teevee. My favorite is Abducted Housewives, but I'm looking forward to the Earth version of that Martian hit, Are You Tastier Than a Five-Year-Old?

On to the freebies. A motley crew today - more dragons for Chinese New Year, a rustic Virgin, some hipster chickens and my current favorite subject, hideous food. Enjoy.

All images are high resolution and free for your use. Please don't add them to digital collections for resale. Click below to visit my shop!