Friday, October 28, 2011

Bird watching




I've been intrigued by the trade cards in the American Singer song bird series since first spotting them a few years ago. J. L. Ridgway's watercolor illustrations are elegant and the printing is, too. Ridgway -  whose first and middle names are John Livzey - often collaborated with his brother, Robert, an ornithologist. J.L. illustrated numerous books and his work can be found for fairly reasonable prices.

I have a handful of cards and, as you can see from the images, they are damaged, giving me an excuse to use them in collages. There are 16 cards in the series, which was published from 1898 through the 1920s by The Singer Manufacturing Company. Yes, Singer as in sewing machines. The back of the cards advertised the latest Singer products. I'd love to show those, but my cards were pasted into scrapbooks and when they were removed, well, the paper stuck to them, obscuring the ads.

There are lots of reprints of the cards out there - and Singer reprinted the series, too. The earliest versions have an oval Singer logo on the top left corner, are numbered on the top right, include Ridgway's signature near the bottom right and the copyright information along the bottom. Happily, all of mine are before 1919, so they are copyright free!

Ogden Was Bent On Mischief


Oops! I know I said that yesterday's post was the final Halloween one, but I forgot about Ogden. He's a Victorian engraving from The Chatterbox magazine and is one of the many illustrations of chubby-cheeked children from that era that creep me out.

I can't explain why. Even minus the mask, he disturbs me. So, what better image for a Halloween collage?

I added color to his cheeks and lips, and now that I'm looking at it on the computer screen, well, I may go back and add color to the mask. The text is from a holiday crafts book and the smidgen of orange is from a recycled book proof. 4.75" x 4.75" on archival mat board.

Matted to fit a standard 9" x 9" frame. $75 + $7 shipping & handling.