Great Websites

One of the most fun things about searching for vintage illustrations to add to Reusable Art is when I discover a wonderful artist with whom I am unfamiliar with.

This week brought one such discovery, Ida Waugh. Her specialty? Wonderful portraits and illustrations of young children and infants.

Yahoo! is jumping into the social networking game with Yahoo! Buzz. Bloggers across the Internet are sharing their thoughts and wondering if this is indeed a competitor for Digg.

Many are asking if Buzz will be another place to promote their blogs and others wonder if it just another copycat site of the hugely popular Digg.

From time to time I get great submissions to Crafty Tips that just don’t seem to be a fit but are great sites worthy of discussion. This week brought one such site to my submission queues and I will warn you now, it is a bit addictive…Think Draw - a fun new online drawing site.

I know I’ve talked about my art site before but I am so excited about how it is growing. The search engines are finally starting to send me some traffic and a few other crafters have started adding links to it from their websites - Thank you, thank you, thank you.

In case you missed my earlier posts, the website I’m talking about is Reusable Art. Reusable Art celebrates old illustrations, pictures, and photos from books and magazines. These wonderful pieces of art have fallen out of copyright and are now in the public domain. Crafters, website designers, and anyone who’s stick figures need subtitles like mine do can find a growing collection of Free Downloadable Images.

Did you know that when old artwork falls out of copyright, that you can use that same artwork for new crafts that can be given away, traded, or even sold? That’s good news for scrapbookers, stationers, collage makers, mixed media artists and anyone else who needs a steady supply of interesting pictures for their work.

First a few words about what copyright means. Copyrights are given to the creator of a work the moment that work is first published. The idea is to allow the creator to enjoy the appropriate compensation and accolades for their endeavors. The length the creator of a work and his/her descendants enjoy copyright protection varies from country to country.

Copyrights were never truly intended to create ownership forever. According to a gentleman at the US Copyright office that I spoke with recently, copyrights are not forever and the intent is that the creative works will be built upon to create something even greater. Which means that once a creative work is no longer under copyright protection it can be freely used however an artist sees fit.