Rainbow Art Collection

This is a collection of art work you can use for newsletters, web site backgrounds, howdy folks, whatever. You just can't use these for commercial purposes of course, or you'll screw up your karma.

These were scanned in out of a few different sources of Rainbow Family publications. These were several years worth of various regional newsletters and howdy folks from OM Valley Family, Katuh Family, SCROLL, Colorado Family, Northwest Tribes, Ozark Family, HO!, SOS, Orb, All Ways Free, and Rainbow Vision into Practice.

The idea was to make these available to other focalizers. Many folks already have their own collections of Rainbow clip art, and do all of the editing by xerox machine, scissors, and glue. This collection is to bring this process into the digital age, and to spread this resource around to folks that may need them.

Tech Details

All of the tools I use to process, edit, or modify these images is free or shareware. They're every bit as good as Photo Shop. I start by using Paint Shop Pro to scan in, and do the initial mixing. This program runs on Win95 and NT. I then use Gimp to remove most of the image editing work, although paint shop can be used for this too. I just prefer Gimp, because it runs on my Linux machine. Gimp also has a excellent "fuzzy" selection tool that's perfect for cleaning the fuzzies and other random glitches left from scanning. (newsprint isn't a very good material to scan) Finally I then use XV to manipulate the images which I store as 2 index gifs. By storing the images as indexed gifs, I can using xv, grab the foreground or background colors and manipulate their colors. This is great for making web site backgrounds, plus the images take up less disk space.

Briefly, I scan all my photos in as 256 colors, 150DPI. This seems to be the best resolution for web sites. I'll then resize the photo to make a postage stamp sized version for the web page, and then clicking on that smaller image will bring up the full sized one. I can convert most any grahpic format, but for a web page, I use .jpg or .gif. Both of these are compressed formats, and I use .jpg for the final image cause they load much faster over a slow modem connection.

The Collections

Clip Art: This is a clip art of all sizes and shapes. Some of these are tiny, perfect for filling up that little white space. Some of the bigger ones are good to just doddle or write around to give a page some life.
Borders: These are borders, corners, and frames. These are great to fill break up the monotony of a boring page. Some of these cover alot of the page, with large spaces left to fill in as you want.
Full Pages: These are full pages, covered in art work. These mostly come from Howdy Folks. There are now blank areas that can be filled in with a map, directions, and a little bit of info and presto! Instant Howdy Folks!

How To Submit

There are several ways you can submit photos. Ideally you can ftp them to ftp.welcomehome.org and leave them in the incoming directory. Then email me and tell me what the file name is. I'd also appreciate a few lines of description for each photo roughly telling folks what it is, or what you were feeling at the time.

Other ways to submit are to email me a photo as a MIME attachement, or as a final way, snail mail me a photo to:

Rob
PO Box 506
Nederland, CO 80466

and I'll eventualy scan them in and add them to the web site.