Restoring 1,347 plates of wildlife illustrations · ↗ www.c82.net

I love biological illustrations. 19^th/20^th century naturalist Ernst Haeckel may be my favourite artist (he was also the first person to describe the First World War as such, shortly after it began). I have two plates from his masterpiece Art Forms in Nature (Discomedusae and Actiniae, for the record). I’d love to try my hand at digitally restoring some of the original scans, which is something I’ve done with some other archival images that have ended up on my walls.

But nothing I could dream of compares to what Nicholas Rougeux accomplished in nine months. He beautifully restored more than 1,300 wildlife illustrations comprising naturalist William Jardine’s 40-volume series The Naturalist’s Library. The blog post describing his process is fascinating. There’s a lot of inspiration to take from this project (and probably some wall art, too). Check out the results here.

^{Hat tip to gslin on Hacker News.}