Dear Subscriber,
Happy Easter plus a few days! I hope your Sunday was delightful. Signs of spring are everywhere - and the weather forecast tells us that we might very well get another snowstorm on Saturday. Ah, April! (Right now the wind is blowing a gale, and my floor is covered with the little puffy remnants of maple tree blossoms that I track in every time I go outside!)
Before I move on to talk about the current issue of Victorian Times, I want to gleefully announce - just in time for spring - a lovely new Victorian coloring book that I've just produced! It's titled A Victorian Floral Fantasy, and offers 40 simply gorgeous (yes, I do say so myself) pages of floral designs adapted from a host of Victorian sources. Of course, the Victorian design books themselves adapted these same designs from floral patterns from around the world and throughout the ages (Victorians were great borrowers!), so this book is both "Victorian" and "international." My sister (who is responsible for the coloring job in the cover) gave it the best possible review: "I want to color every page!" (If you're a colorist, you know what that means; whenever you pick up a new book you think, "Must do that one; that one, meh... That one maybe... Ooh, gotta do that one...") See below for more details!
And now on to the April issue, which is technically our "Easter" issue (it does have one Easter article) and full of fun stuff, including a marvelous look at the lives of Victorian working women:
Visit http://www.victorianvoices.net/VT/issues/VT-1804.shtml to download this issue!
Or download it directly from DropBox:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/bur610gpyv1b1ue/VT-1804.pdf?dl=0
LOVE TO COLOR? YOU'LL LOVE OUR NEW COLORING BOOK!
We're tickled pink (or with pinks) over our new Victorian-themed coloring book, A Victorian Floral Fantasy. If you love flowers and love to color, this is the coloring book for you! It brings you 40 elegant floral designs adapted from a host of Victorian sources, including textile patterns, architectural designs, wallpapers, and Victorian seed catalogs.
This is the perfect book for chilling out, kicking back, de-stressing, and just putting aside the cares of the day. Surround yourself with the colors and patterns of the Victorian garden, and let your imagination run wild.
I'm also tickled pink over having discovered, in Photoshop, how to create a web gallery - so you can preview nearly half of the book! Just visit http://www.victorianvoices.net/books/coloring.shtml to see this book and also a preview of our previous Victorian-themed book, Elegant Designs of the Ages. And again I want to take this opportunity to thank my sister for the fantastic cover; I think of myself as a pretty decent "colorist," but my jaw hit the floor when I saw what she did with my patterns! (That's a William Morris wallpaper, BTW, and I think Morris would have been pleased! Ironically, I think my sister sits in her Morris chair - yep, a genuine reclining Morris chair - when she colors...)
OUR FIRST CLIP-ART COLLECTION IS AVAILABLE!
We're also pleased to announce the publication of our very first Victorian clip art collection. (We hope it will be the first of many...) The Victorian Dogs Clip Art Collection offers dog-lovers more than 1300 images of dogs, including over 125 dog breeds, 50 full-color "ready to frame" prints from Cassell's Book of the Dog and Cassell's New Book of the Dog, a collection of high-resolution Landseer prints, Harrison Weir's dog illustrations from Chatterbox magazine, and much more.
I'm not going to run on about the virtues of this collection here; I'll limit my promotional meanderings to two things: (1) High resolution images and (2) virtually no usage restrictions. All the images are at least 300 dpi and most are 600 dpi - which means you aren't going to open this collection and see a bunch of tiny, 65KB files that aren't good for much of anything but viewing on screen. And we don't care what you use these for - personal, commercial, whatever - unlike some other collections that have a set of restrictions that runs on for over a page! (Partly because we actually know what "public domain" really means...) To find out more, and see our preview galleries (I went a bit crazy with my newfound prowess with the Web Gallery tool), visit http://www.victorianvoices.net/clipart/dogs.shtml .
Thank you all for being a part of the VictorianVoices.net family!
Happy Spring!
Your Intrepid Editor,
Moira Allen