Vintage Graphics & Illustrations

Vintage illustrations: where they came from and what you are actually buying

If you look along the bottom edge of an old engraved plate, there are usually two names on it, one at each end, and they belong to two people who split the job between them. The one on the left made the original drawing, and the one on the right is the person who cut that drawing into the metal so it could be printed.

You can tell which is which from the abbreviation after the name. On the left you get del., from delineavit, meaning they drew it, and on the right sc., from sculpsit, meaning they carved it. On a plate after Turner, then, the composition belongs to Turner, but every line you can see on the paper was made by an engraver working from his drawing. Natural history plates often carry three or four names, because somebody drew the specimen, somebody engraved it, somebody printed it, and often somebody else coloured it in by hand afterward.

This is still worth knowing when you buy a vintage set, because the things people actually want from this material — the hatching, the weight of the line, the way tone is built up out of strokes rather than shading — mostly came from the engraver and from the printing, not from whoever drew the original. It also explains why these sets arrive as scans, and why a modern redraw of the same picture tends to feel wrong even when the drawing underneath it is accurate.

Vintage illustrations in commercial work

• Apothecary-style packaging for cosmetics, herbal products and supplements.
• Wine, spirits and preserve labels that want an inherited look.
• Book covers and chapter openers, particularly nonfiction and historical fiction.
• Museum, archive and heritage site material.
• Menus and interiors for restaurants trading on age, real or otherwise.
• Editorial illustration for pieces with no photograph attached.
• Stationery, prints and paper goods sold on the strength of the artwork itself.

Handling scanned period artwork

Check the pixel dimensions against where it's going, and don't trust a big number on its own. Book plates are small objects, often under 150mm across, so a high-resolution scan is a detailed scan of something small, and the paper grain grows along with the drawing. Look at it at final size before you build a cover or a poster around it.

Go carefully with the cleanup. These plates build volume from hatching density, so pulling the levels up to lose the paper takes the palest lines along. Work from a luminosity mask instead and accept a slightly grey background. If a dot pattern appears when you enlarge, the source was printed through a halftone screen, and past a certain size there's nothing much you can do about it.

Try not to mix a redrawn vector with a scan of the same kind of artwork in one layout. They don't sit together well: the vector comes out looking synthetic, and the scan looks dirty next to it. Pick one, or take the texture off everything and let the drawing carry it.

Sources vintage material comes from

• Natural history plates. Engraved fish, birds, beasts, insects, and botany from old field guides and encyclopedias. Detailed, tonal, drawn to be looked at closely.
• Anatomical and scientific figures. Diagrams and studies from medical and technical publishing.
• Ephemera. Printed matter that was never meant to survive: postage stamps, newspaper clippings, tickets, labels and price tags.
• Folk art. Regional decorative traditions redrawn as vector: flat, symmetrical, built from repeated motifs.
• Occult and mythological plates. Witches, monsters, portents and religious ornament from early printed books.
• Photographed objects. Statues, pressed flowers and dried herbs shot and cut out, with real light and real shadow.