One day I decided to go on a hunt to find adequate representations of Louis Sullivan’s “System of Architectural Ornament”–an elegant 20 plates describing Sullivan’s design methodology. I failed. The original book’s printing process was atrocious having rendered Sullivan’s beautifully subtle shades of grey pencil into a cold dot-matrix of pure black and white. The Art Institute of Chicago only offered to send me measly 600×800 digital images of Sullivan’s original plates, but with such low resolution it was impossible to perceive any detail at all. Therefore, I decided to embark on a journey that will prove to last years–to reconstruct all 20 plates with my own hand.
Observe the fruits of my labor here.