USING NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY IMAGES IN YOUR PATTERN
Here’s a great resource for pattern designers - The New York Public Library Digitals Collection. Not only can you gather inspiration from the over 700,000 digitized items, but you can incorporate public domain images from the site into your patterns.
In fact, the library encourages this, stating on their website that they’ve digitized these materials“...to inspire people to use and reuse the media and data on offer here to advance knowledge and create new works”.
Awesome, right?
And to make life even easier, the library has made almost 200,000 public domain images available for high resolution download. This makes it beyond easy for for artists to remix and use these public domain images in their work. Yes! Yes! Yes!
Cool feature of the site:
A visualization tool that allows you to use a magnifying glass to quickly scan all of the public domain collections at scale. You can search by the century the work was created, the genre, the collection, and by color. I think the color search tool is especially cool if you already have an idea of the color palette you want to use in your work.
NYPL Public Domain Collections that are inspiring me right now:
IMPORTANT: Always confirm for yourself that the image you've selected is part of the public domain. When searching the NYPL site I sometimes find images that have been digitized but are not free to use.
Want more?
Learn how to download public domain items and a bit more about what’s in the collection at https://www.nypl.org/blog/2016/01/05/share-public-domain-collections
Search public domain images released by the British Library at https://www.flickr.com/photos/britishlibrary/sets/72157638544764936/with/11216689325/
Have you been inspired by the New York Library Digital Collection? Which collections do you like and have you worked any images into your patterns?