Falling in love with the Getty Museum Open Access
I am always inspired by art from ages ago. This is my go-to for inspiration. I love searching through Wikimedia Commons and open access provided by assorted museums, looking at and saving images of artworks for future projects.
FREE ACCESS TO PUBLIC DOMAIN IMAGES...
There are loads of public domain images on Wikimedia Commons but not all are actually print-worthy to use in your artworks. I find the best quality of free access with downloads are offered by museums via their open access programs because they generally provide gorgeous printable sizes. Not all museums offer this but Getty does.
The Getty Museum is one of the museums who generously share public domain artworks in their collection with the public by providing links to large downloads of the artworks.
I scoured Getty's website, today, and found myriad treasures. I grabbed several favs from the Mira calligraphiae monumenta, which is an illuminated manuscript from the 1500s. I own a little book of these images purchased many years ago but I was thrilled to find these exact images in the Getty collection with links for download.
I thought I'd share a few with you; I have a hunch you'll love them as I do.
I know that many collage/mixed media artists are very comfortable with printing images for themselves but there are many within that number who are not interested in playing around with image editing software such as photoshop to lay out images to print. But guess who is. And so I did.
FREE SHEET...
I think these images will make great backgrounds. I did a sheet that includes four of the images, with some editing to straighten, a bit of color correction, and resize to lay them out on a US letter-size sheet to make them easy to print.
FULL SIZE scans (actually quite huge)...
The full size scans of these images provided by the Getty (and MORE) are available at getty.edu. Click on "Explore Art" at the top of their webpage and select "Art Collection". There you can do a search for "Mira calligraphiae monumenta".
AND 91,600+ MORE...
If you wish to see the over 91,600 images the Getty has that are free to use, below the search box on that page you'll see a hyperlink that says "Image Use" -click that and select the image to the left that says "Free to use". Here you'll find all their images free to use.
You'll be able to scroll through all or use the search box to find specific eras, artists, or media in the Getty collection if you want to zero in on something specific.
Have a ball, EXPLORE, find something exciting, create amazing things!