* The “Savage Tribes” definition.
Ornaments from Articles belonging to various Savage Tribes, exhibited in the United Services and British Museums.
Jones was obviously a true Victorian fellow and his sensibility was as expected. We do not share his sense that inhabitants of the Pacific Islands should be tagged as “Savage Tribes” and definitely no others.
This first volume of vector graphics is based on the drawings from the first two plates of the Grammar of Ornament, it includes textile patterns from cloths and objects that, at the time, were mainly collected in the United Service Museum; some sample is from the British Museum. The images represent repeat patterns from Otaheite (today Tahiti), Tongotabu of the Friendly Islands (today Tongatabu in the islands also known as Tonga Islands), the Sandwich Islands (today Hawaiian Islands), Feejee Islands (Fiji), Hew Hebrides (today Vanuatu) and other places, mainly in the Pacific.
What Jones calls “Ornament of Savage Tribes” is actually a beautiful collection of unique decorative patterns.
Each element has been meticulously hand-drawn by AlfredoM in vector format.
The Grammar of Ornament
Owen Jones first published this monument of design reference in 1856, in installments for subscribers. Since then have been many editions in many languages including modern reprints.
This beautiful and highly influential publication, illustrated with examples of historical styles of ornament is a classic in its field and still regarded with respect and consulted today. The choice of color used in the book was considered as important and influential as the designs.
The drawing in the plates are based on the massive collection of design patterns gathered by Owen Jones in his travels around the world and from collections residing in British Museums including the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert Museum).
The Making of the Vector Graphics
At first view the making of the graphics from The Grammar of Ornament may be considered quite a simple task, lengthy and tedious, but simple. A more accurate look at the original graphics from the book shows that they are merely hand drawings without any accurate geometrical construction and often tricks of the brush were used to make the ends meet and the pattern look correct while it was not. To create the tiles and the corners of each drawing and each repeating pattern we had first to build the geometry and sometime we had to modify the proportions of the patterns to make them real and possible. Corners were inexistent and have been created for almost all the repeating linear patterns; the design of some linear pattern did not permit the creation of the corner. The EPS version of the graphics preserves in each file our original grouping of the elements, which facilitate the change of colors and/or the extraction of individual elements. All colors have been created as process colors and defined as global.
Vector Graphics
The graphic images that comprise this package are superior re-creations of the Chromolithography images from the plates of The Grammar of Ornament.
Each decorative image and element has been meticulously hand-drawn by AlfredoM in vector format.
Many advanced designers will find our vector file versions with the following desirable feature preserved: original hierarchies and groupings to facilitate modifications and enable the extraction of unique elements. Though resolution-independent vector formats insure high-quality reproduction at any size and allow complete latitude for pre-production modifications, our CD collections also include common pixel-based file formats of each graphic and a vector format supported by Office applications for desktop publication. |
