The art of redrawing with exactitude Nicholas Rougeux
The designer and illustrator
Nicholas Rougeux has worked over the last few years linking two centuries of illustration and research with his lines, and, most importantly, has made it available to everyone through the Internet. The illustrator’s work has focused on the study of two highly coveted and discontinued books:
Illustrations of the Natural Orders of Plants by Elizabeth Twining (1868) and
Werner’s Nomenclature of colours by P. Syme (1821).Rougeux’s work has gone far beyond the study of texts and their dissemination techniques. The artist has gone through each of the traces, vectorized and reproduced the original colors and texts, producing an interactive version of the books so that they can be consulted and studied by anyone.
Although these projects started almost as a hobby to review the use of vectorization software, they have turned out to be the artist’s main occupation in the last year. In launching the latest project,
Illustrations of the Natural Orders of Plants, Nicholas was aware of the relevance of the work he was doing not only in the world of art and illustration, but in providing a useful
tool for future researchers and curious. The result are two beautiful and colorful compendia, an encyclopedia that allows to get lost in the depth of a work that 200 years ago was created with the same care and precision that Rougeux has demonstrated now.
The website of Illustrations of the Natural Orders of Plants allows you to read the original texts of the publication, which referred to the illustrations that accompanied it. Rougeux’s work has allowed that, for example, you can point to each of the species with the mouse, and this is highlighted in the parallel illustration, or the development of a “diagram of similarities”. Twining described the relationship between the species, but Rougeux’s work allows us to interactively see the direct relationship.
The great reception with Illustrations of the Natural Orders of Plants has inspired Rougeux to even produce posters which it has put on sale through the same website, to continue supporting its digitization projects. If you like illustration, botany or art, don’t miss all the projects the artist has developed.
Nicholas Rougeux Online Projects
Proyectos en línea de Nicholas Rougeux
Illustrations of the Natural Orders of Plants with Groups and Descriptions de Elisabeth Twining
Werner’s Nomenclature of colours de P. Syme
Byrne’s Euclid