and another one - with close-up too

Incidentally, with the close-up you can see one of the problems of using these very old original pieces - their condition deteriorates and we often have a lot of work to do to "restore" them digitally before we can use anything. I began with the playing card images, as I thought they'd be of immediate interest to tarot people. But some of the others are even more lovely. I'll try to get round to showing more. For now though, we've just had quite a large order from a REALLY nice shop here and have to deliver (by midnight - how very Prague!) so will be running off soon.

Some amazingly beautiful, original Art Nouveau pieces

We found some original Art Nouveau (1895) prints some months back - and bought as many as we could. Recently I've been scanning them and thought I should show a few. So - some beautiful playing card images (this is half the set on the print we have). Glorious.

Farewell canary!

Well, the canary found a home - the best home you can imagine too. An illustrator - a woman with children - whose last canary DIED OF OLD AGE WHEN IT WAS OVER FIFTEEN YEARS OLD! I can tell you, our canary could not WAIT to pack its bags. We donated cage, food and all the rest too - and canary went off with never a backward glance - fickle bird. I'll miss her (we think it was a girl canary) but on the other hand, living in a design studio was not ideal - too many places to get into trouble. I'm so pleased we found the right home. As for the illustrator? Well, now there is a whole other story. I'll be posting more on this next year :-) Another good day.

A plunge into the Gothic - a trio of devils

We went off to a local antiquarian bookshop to try to buy some more of the original Art Nouveau plates they were selling some time back. Extraordinary, beautiful things, I must post some - they now being put to good use by us - a couple are really inspirational for See of Logos. They had none there today, but we did find a very evocative old book with really GOOD photos and prints of Gothic (in the historical sense) wooden statues and reliefs from Krakow (oh - I just heard a friend is planning to begin a farmhouse cheese-making business in Krakow, which seems exciting - but I digress). Anyway, unbelievable carvings. They have such humanity and expressiveness. Here are some devils from this book - pretty splendid and spooky - not to mention bizarre. I love this period of work - especially when it's as well done as this. Oddly enough the last few days have been ridiculously good work-wise. A couple of really interesting book proposals came in, we had a very good meeting with a lovely illustrator here who we finally tracked down (having spotted her delicate, interesting work in a gallery), and some really splendid design ideas from Anna. Oh - plus we finally seem to have found a decent distributor here - someone who will get our work into the kinds of shops that visitors go to (and that sparked off another idea for a book too). Odd how you get these very fruitful periods. Oh - and TWO good, glossy magazines are running competitions around BBCsts - more of that later maybe. It's great really - though lots of work sending off the relevant information etc too.

Ooh - the Court Pate Maker - what a grand title to have!

Just sending someone details of how to get here, I came across the site for the house (now hotel) next door. What a GREAT history. I would date our house to around the same - early 17th century - but don't know the full details. I wonder how I could go about finding out? Prague houses have such fantastic (almost literally) pasts. http://prague.travelcook.com/constans/