I spent an absurd amount of time today looking around for good blogs on book illustrations and the publishing industry and all the other pretty ideas related to my goal of becoming a book illustrator. I found about twelve worth subscribing to in my RSS reader, then tossed them all in an illustration-crazy Google custom search and used Ready2Search to put the whole thing up in my Firefox search bar (side note: i don’t think i should have needed Ready2Search. A search toolbar plugin seems like the sort of thing which should be included in Google CSE by default.)
I’m really glad i went to the little extra trouble to set up the custom search, because while playing around with it i discovered some lovely things which are too old to show up in the RSS reader:
- Henry Sene Yee’s rejected book cover design involving crash dummies and the Kama Sutra
- The quite awesome, and nearly entirely hand-done, cover for The Worst Years of Your Life, a book which i’d never heard of before but now desperately want a copy of
- A typographical Picard Manoeuvre (as described in the comments)
- …and a paper AK-47
I’m thinking of putting all the art tutorial sites i frequent into another custom search – the results wouldn’t be nearly as interesting, but i’d no longer have to remember which site it was which posted the tutorial on creating the perfect elfen ears. This is a problem i have more often than i’d like.