I was designing myself a tattoo and got a little carried away vectorizing and re-drawing monks' illustrations from old manuscripts. This poster is the full version, and I'm getting 5" stickers printed of each one, individually. Some of them just look dumb, and others make you wonder what the hell the description was that the artists were going off of. I love how little they knew about aquatic animals, and how many of them just got feet because they didn't know what was going on underwater. Others clearly have human faces because animal faces are hard. Some are understandable because European monks probably didn't have access to a hippo, but others like a cat, owl or fish surely were around. They got human faces anyway.
I'm selling prints here
That rad! I saw that series when I was doing photoresearch.
I want to turn the diamonds from this poster into a sleeve. Just researching artists I don't need to fly to first.
The cat is simply helping his friend reach something on the counter.
The Leopard is my favorite but the Elephant is a very close second.
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Wikipedia has one in glorious color.
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This embroidery is of a pard from Add MS 11283, f.2r (late 12th century).
https://www.flickr.com/photos/cybik/50053494937/
It took me a while to convert each one of these to black while preserving the vibe. Almost all of each one was essentially completely redrawn.
It's interesting how some mythical medieval animals are clearly fanciful but other artists based their art on what they'd seen. I edited my comment and I added a black thread / whitish background of an embroidery is of a pard. Whoever made that definitely used housecats as a model to start from.
I can understand why they'd get the elephant and alligator so wrong, but owls are common throughout Europe!
Right? No one walked by while the person was drawing this and said "Dude, owls don't have lips"?
