I've always admired these sorts of illustrations. Botanical ones too. Please forgive the newb questions, but does this gorgeous illustration style have a name and how was it done (I.e., what is the medium -- some kind of colored ink?)
Colors appear to be added by the restoration process. This kills originality of the works. I would prefer to see an artwork as it was created, not "enhanced" in anyway.
I don’t need another large book to put on my bookshelf that I don’t have time to read, especially one at this price, but I want one.
OTOH, I have had a couple of book/apps on the iPad that were very nice, The Elements (still available) and one with items from MOMA (unfortunately removed from the App Store). That would be a cheaper way to distribute a book like experience.
In France, we have https://citadelles-mazenod.com/ and they publish large and gorgeous books... If only I had the Space to buy them. I bought a few when they were on sales, so two digits instead of 3 was good, but some limited and even larger are often > 500€. And not having the space to buy some of these kills me.
I'm assuming it is quite nice, but terrible adverts popping up all over the place and distracting from the overall experience, so I only skimmed through it before I closed the window (on a work computer hence no adblock!)
Here's something similar from The Guardian, but without the ads:
More at https://www.c82.net/blog/making-of-naturalists-library, you can see that the source material was actually in pretty good condition, just aged and yellowed; they used Photoshop's AI to stitch drawings that were spread out over two pages together. And probably some upscaling.
That link has a big section on their use of AI that ends with:
> Overall, AI played a critical role in many aspects of this project for things I couldn’t do myself but the vast majority of the work was done manually the “old fashioned way” from creating the design and writing the code to restoring each plate and formatting all the text to designing the book and posters. I have no doubt that a lot more could have been done with AI but I still enjoy putting in the elbow grease to create something just the way I want.
I took that to mean filling in the gaps on the source data, not literally filling in pen and ink gaps in the drawing. If so, that's a shame. It pollutes the original and isn't what counts as restoration.
I'm looking through https://www.c82.net/naturalists-library/illustrations and all the illustrations seems to be of non-dissected animals/insects, at the illustration themselves. Of course, impossible to know if the illustration was drawn from a dead or alive specimen, but none of them seems based on anything picked apart as far as I can tell.
Remember when it was totally controversial that Ted Turner intended to colorize classic films such as Casablanca, and how technology was going to ruin artistry in this way? Good times.
I don't like most of the colourisations of old films. I try and seek out the black and white versions when I can. B&W is a different medium from colour.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_William_Jardine,_7th_Baron...
OTOH, I have had a couple of book/apps on the iPad that were very nice, The Elements (still available) and one with items from MOMA (unfortunately removed from the App Store). That would be a cheaper way to distribute a book like experience.
Here's something similar from The Guardian, but without the ads:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jun/18/natural-...
> Overall, AI played a critical role in many aspects of this project for things I couldn’t do myself but the vast majority of the work was done manually the “old fashioned way” from creating the design and writing the code to restoring each plate and formatting all the text to designing the book and posters. I have no doubt that a lot more could have been done with AI but I still enjoy putting in the elbow grease to create something just the way I want.
I think that's clear
As an example, all the drawn butterflies seems to be drawn as if they were alive, not dead (https://www.emilydamstra.com/please-enough-dead-butterflies/).