Sometimes it is really hard to get inspired. There is too much information and we usually feel we are not creating nothing new. That is the way Internet changed our lives, making us feel everything we can do is just to make efforts to recreate something.

I want to give you a simple advise: Go back to the origins.

When I was creating the article about the history of Illustration, I was thinking a lot about all the people who were designing and illustrating with rudimentary tools. No internet. No Photoshop. No computers. They just had imagination and inspiration to work.

There was a whole age, of the Greeks (“Keep good relations with the Greecians.” — George W. Bush, as quoted in The Economist, April 9, 1999) and Roman Empire, who inspires the Occidental civilization. In art, they came back with the Neoclassicism in the midth of the 18th century. The art is always growing and evolving feeding from recreated sources.

Go back to the origins means looking back for the sources (in our case, in art), and recreate inspired by the aesthetic look. That is all. I was surfing the web up and down, looking for the images for the article of the history of illustration and I felt inspired for every single image I was collecting.

But now, I don´t want to recommend you to visit Flickr or other sites with talented artist, like Behance.net. I am inviting you to go to the real sources: illuminated manuscripts; old books; ephemeras; advertising from 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries; medical illustration, newspapers, etc.

If you have some time, visit your library and check the old books they have there. Check the old newspapers, magazines and all the printed paper there. Visit the museums. Search for new (old) typography. You must check the work of Igino Marini with the Fell Types directly on his web http://iginomarini.com/fell/

And finally: Please…Leave your computer¡

If you don´t have enough time… well, take your computer again and go to internet.

This time, I am glad to introduce you the British Library and Wellcome Images. You don´t have to travel to Britain, of course. They are just a second away. From the profane to the sacred, from the art to the science. The collection of the British Library includes over 150 million items, in most known languages, including manuscripts, maps, newspapers, magazines, prints and drawings, music scores, and patents. Wellcome Images is one of the world’s richest and most unique collections, with themes ranging from medical and social history to contemporary healthcare and biomedical science, containing “historical images from the Wellcome Library collections, Tibetan Buddhist paintings, ancient Sanskrit manuscripts written on palm leaves, beautifully illuminated Persian books and much more”.

I picked up some images for you.

Get inspired.

British Library

http://www.bl.uk/

Wellcome Images

http://images.wellcome.ac.uk/

Source Box:

All the images from:

British Library

http://www.bl.uk/

Wellcome Images

http://images.wellcome.ac.uk/