“Patience” was this project’s theme. Breathing new life into Les Liliacées and Les Roses—two of Pierre-Joseph Redouté’s most well known collections—taught me a lot about it during the year I spent on this project.
Hummingbirds are the closest living descendants of dinosaurs like the T. rex—one of many fascinating facts I learned while working on the digital edition of A Monograph of the Trochilidæ, or Family of Humming-Birds. Gaining unexpected knowledge has to be one of the best parts about working on a project.
A complete reproduction and restoration of J. G. Heck and Spencer F. Baird’s collection of 13,000+ illustrations from 1851
Have you ever had an idea that sticks with you? One popped into my head when I stumbled across James Sowerby’s massive collection of mineral illustrations from the nineteenth century. I naively wondered how they would look arranged by color in a big collage and spent the next three and a half months making it happen with British & Exotic Mineralogy…and learning new levels of patience along the way.
If someone told me when I was young that I would spend three months of my time tracing nineteenth century botanical illustrations and enjoy it, I would have scoffed, but that’s what I did to reproduce Elizabeth Twining’s Illustrations of the Natural Orders of Plants and I loved every minute.
