great sources for beautiful stencils?

February 2, 2007 4:01 PM

where on-line can we find great illustrations of animals, insects, vehicles and plants to turn into stencils for our homebrew t-shirts for our kids and friends?

preferrably stylised (art nouveau, art deco, naif or contemporary; no kitsch, please); we've been browsing drawn.ca and illoz.com, and various stencil outlets for inspiration. what are some other great places? is there such a thing as a universal illustration database by subject?

posted by progosk to sports, hobbies, & recreation (6 answers total)

If you want to pay for it, there's Clipart.com. They have a pretty huge selection.
posted by MsMolly at 4:09 PM on February 2, 2007

If you're using Illustrator, the free IAN Symbol Libraries are great.
posted by davebush at 5:00 PM on February 2, 2007

A while back I was looking for an image of a bee and found this page, you'll have to trace it if you're looking to make a vector, but it's a start.
posted by JulianDay at 5:07 PM on February 2, 2007

This question asked for 1920s images specifically, but there are lots of good suggestions that should be useful to you, too.

If you can deal with digital images on a CD and don't need them right now, Dover Publications is the best. If you must have online images, you can try poking around in their sampler page archive. (Link goes to the current page; for last week's page, change the "0202" in the URL to "0126," then "0119" for the previous week's, and so on.)
posted by vetiver at 7:02 PM on February 2, 2007

Not that they're terribly useful in their format, nor would it be terribly legal, but this made me think of O'reilly's tech books.
(Their online book service is called "Safari," which might tell you something—every book has a line-drawn illustration of all manner of animals for each of their books.)

Might be nice for illustration.
posted by disillusioned at 12:34 AM on February 3, 2007

Illustration == inspiration, in my last comment.
posted by disillusioned at 12:34 AM on February 3, 2007