Low-key relaunch

Hello there, welcome back.

I’ve relaunched my website after five years offline. (Well, more or less: I wrote a few things in 2023 but didn’t publish them.)

I’ve been working on a new portfolio website for some time, but it’s not ready to put live. Now, after deciding to document my future creative projects, there’s an immediate need for a place to write.

I’ve postponed my plans to finish the full site and instead have carved off just the journal and bashed it into reasonable shape. It’s pretty messy under the hood, but it’s good enough for now.

My first project is a digital edition of the nineteenth century natural history publication Icones Avium by John and Elizabeth Gould.

The Plumed Partridge (Oreortyx plumifera) is one of 18 birds depicted in Icones Avium, a nineteenth century publication by John and Elizabeth Gould that I’m converting into a digital edition.

Last year I was inspired by the work of Nicholas Rougeux, data artist and designer, who had created a beautiful digital edition of John Gould’s Hummingbirds. I’d been looking for a new digital project for some time, and seeing Nicholas’ work inspired me into action.

As a result, I rediscovered my love of birds and bird illustration (I’d been a keen amateur bird watcher in my youth), and this led me back to the wealth of 18th and 19th century natural history books about birds, mammals, insects, indeed the entire natural world.

I’d been aware of Audubon’s Birds of America for years, and had a passing knowledge of the extensive bird art produced in the 18th and 19th centuries. But I hadn’t realised just how much of it existed. I spent weeks absorbing as much as could, courtesy of public domain digital collections such as Biodiversity Heritage Library, Kansas University and New York Public Library.

The art I discovered was stunning and I knew then what I wanted to do: turn these amazing works into digital editions and bring them to a wider audience.

After searching hundreds of digitized publications, I settled on Icones Avium. With only 18 colour plates and limited text, it would be small enough to explore a workflow for how to convert these natural history works.

I’ll keep a development diary about it here and update my Bluesky account for each new post.

After five years offline, it’s nice to have a place again where I can share my thoughts about my projects and other interests.

Let’s see where this goes…