I've seen the illustrations here and there growing up in Ontario. I didn't pay attention to who created them. Just enjoyed the detail and the colours, the types of flowers: trilliums, lady's slipper, jack-in-the-pulpit, wildflowers I would look for in woodlands, gardens, anywhere they might turn up. Today I looked up the name and discovered she was the daughter of Susanna Moodie, a well known author here in Ontario.

Canadian born, Agnes Dunbar Fitzgibbon Chamberlin (née Moodie; 1833–1913) was an Ontario artist.

She was born Agnes Dunbar Moodie. Her parents were John and Susanna Moodie. Agnes learned how to paint flowers from her mother.

Susana (Strickland) Moodie, sister of Catharine Parr Traill, wrote about life as a New Canadian, 'Roughing it in the Bush' about her experience farming in Ontario during the 1830's. Her sister, Catharine, wrote from a different perspective, about history in Ontario.

In 1868, Canadian Wild Flowers was published, viewed as one of the first serious botanical works published in Canada, which included text by Catharine Parr Traill. The book, very expensive for its time, was sold by subscription, largely through its author's own efforts; as an enterprising widow, she also worked as an illustrator to support her children and herself.

Agnes had 2 husbands (remarried after the first died in 1865) and 9 children.

In 1863, she began her paintings of Canadian flora to illustrate a book by her aunt, Catharine Parr Traill. After the death of her husband, she began work on a book of Canadian wild flowers, with her water-coloured illustrations and Traill's text. The book attracted 500 subscriptions, a significant number at the time.

Her paintings have been presented at exhibitions in Canada, USA, and England since 1886. She died in Toronto in 1913. Her heirs presented her paintings and copies of Canadian Wild Flowers and Studies of Plant Life in Canada to the University of Toronto in 1934–5.

• Summarized and quoted from Wikipedia.

I think we still have a copy of one of the reprints of the wildflower book. My Mother enjoyed Canadian and Ontario history along with gardening, antique furniture and other hobbies that became popular in the 1970's. That must be where I first saw these illustrations.

Pixel artists work with tiny dots, pixels. Created with the use of raster graphics software, images are edited on the pixel level. Pixel art is a style of digital art,

A pixel is one tiny dot of colour in an image. Pixel art then, is an image created with tiny dots. It is also known as low resolution art and 8-bit art.

An image created in the pixel art style is not usually smooth, like a photographed image. If you look, you can see the dots, especially around the edges. Comic books were created with pixel images so you could see the dots if you looked closely at those too.

Once an image is evolved past the pixel art level it gets that polished, finished look and (to me) it isn't really pixel art any more. It becomes computer generated or digital art. The main difference between pixel art and any other computer or digitally created art is that the artist works with the pixels, the actual dots which make up the image.

The word pixelated, in reference to an image, means the image is blurry - the pixels have too much space between them and have likely been stretched out due to the image being enlarged past the point it was meant to be shown.

Pixel art is coming back into use because it isn't a bandwidth hog the way a photograph or an image with higher resolution would be. So, for mobile technology, pixel art allows more images to be used because they take up less space in the memory and can be sent much faster too.

Pixel Art is Used for...

• favicons
• avatars
• video games
• low res images
• dollz (pixel dolls)
• and various other new, retro and developing places

Techniques for Making Pixel Art Pixelating, making pixel art, starts with a simple line drawing, sketch or outline. Colours are added to give the image shape, shading and definition.

Start with the basic lines of the image you want to create, this is called the line art. Line art can be original or created from a scan of another drawing. The artist creates their own version of the original drawing, with their own vision and concept.

Dithering and hand-made anti-aliasing are used to bring different shades and colours into the art. Dithering basically uses two colours and by varying the density you can get different tones of colour. Anti-aliasing will smooth curves and changes between colours.

Saving the finished art

Pixel art is saved to either a PNG file or a GIF. JPG images files will make the pixel art appear mussed or messy.

Pixel Art is also Useful for Creating FavIcons You have likely noticed a favicon before, maybe you didn't know it had an official name. A favicon is the short form of, favourite icon. Favicons are used as tiny images which your web browser picks up and shows on the address bar next to the URL for the site you are visiting.

You may even have created your own favicon at one time. I have. The trick is creating something which will still look like something recognizable within the limits of the size the image has to be.

Pixel Dolls. net