Art Every Day :Project 365:

A little snippet of a 365 project inspired by Noah Scalin; Art Every Day. I'm making some form of art every day! LINK: Vimeo

Letterpress Dice Prints

Etsy user Stukenborg arranges dice in letterpresses, rolls ink over them, and makes prints. The popularity of this form of printmaking, which formed the basis of Gutenberg’s press, has grown in the past two decades.

Gallery and Process Photos, Via: DudeCraft | Photo: Stukenborg, Via: Neatorama

The Opium Museum

The Opium Museum is, at the heart, about the trade in rare antiques, since opium smoking paraphernalia was outlawed. Still, there are pages and pages of the history of opium and its use in countries all over the world, with many historical photographs.

Beginning in the 18th century, opium accompanied the Chinese diaspora: first to the Chinese quarters of Asian cities, and later to the Chinatowns of the West, particularly North America, where opium smoking in the Chinese manner and with Chinese-made paraphernalia became fashionable among non-Chinese.

Once the drug was banned and its paraphernalia outlawed, these illicit items were heaped into piles and burned in public bonfires. From Shanghai to Saigon to San Francisco, the means to smoke opium were destroyed along with the drug itself. So few examples of these relics remain that most experts on Chinese art are blithely unaware of just how sumptuous and opulent this art form had become during its heyday.

For serious collectors, there is information on how to identify genuine opium tools and have them appraised. Link -Via: Metafilter, Via: Neatorama

Art Forms of Nature: The Ernst Haeckel Collection

Haeckel produced illustrations that people could take in and understand, images that glowed with color and brought the exotic and remote in to the libraries of the world. Really, there had not been anything like these extraordinary prints before. They were the culmination of decades of works for Haeckel, a contemporary of Darwin and he did much to popularize the work of the English naturalist although their ideas did diverge at several important points, as we shall later discover. The above is the 89th plate from Art Forms of Nature and shows a variety of turtle species. From the Leatherback at the top left to the Common Snapping Turtle (bottom right), Haeckel captures them marvelously. This was no attempt at photorealism, however. Note how sea and land (seamlessly) merge in the picture. His images, did, however, encapsulate his sense of order. LINK