Arabian Ornament
A collection of Arabian modular vector borders, dividers and background tiles hand-drawn in eps format in Adobe Illustrator.
Based on the images of the Plates 31, 32, 33, 34 and 35 of the Chapter 8 of the Grammar of Ornament. This volume is dedicated to the Arabian Ornament from Cairo, a comprehensive collection of graphics based on sculptured and painted patterns as well as repeating floor patterns.
The images from the original plates are drawn from a varied selection of sources from Cairo: the Mosque of Sultan Kalaoon, the Mosque En Nasireeyeh, Mosque of Tooloon, Mosque El Barkookeyen, various other Mosques and many other buildings including private houses.
Many of those graphics are inspired by walls, arches and ceiling ornaments that were executed in plaster, others are based on marble and tiles floors originally in white, black and red.The images from the plate 34 are inspired on the pages of the splendid copy of the Koran at the Mosque El Barkookeyeh, founded A.D. 1384.
The material for these five Plates of the Arabian Ornament were furnished to Owen Jones by James William Wild, who passed a considerable time in Cairo studying the interior decoration of the Arabian houses, and they may be regarded as very faithful transcripts of Cairean ornament.
Our vector graphics have been hand-drawn with the correct geometric construction and are perfectly tileable as tiles, linear borders and page borders, dividers and decorative elements. For all the patterns of which the design permitted, we have created the corners tiles.
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. |
