Kunstformen der Natur – Ernst Haeckel

I while ago I read in a

what was defined by Manuel Lima [http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/blog/?author=1] as “outstanding work of nineteen century German biologist Ernst Haeckel”. I got quite interested, primo because I find it very attracting the art that exits behind the nature forms, secondo it is quite nice to see works from the past.

Seurat vai à Rússia… [http://jeraman.wordpress.com/2009/09/05/seurat-vai-a-russia/]

where jeraman got inspired by a color photography of the beginning of 20th century by Prokudin-Gorskii

Kunstformen der Natur

I while ago I read two posts [subblue's post] [visualcomplexity's post]  discussing an illustrated book of 1904 which was defined by Manuel Lima as “an outstanding work of nineteen century German biologist Ernst Haeckel”. The name of the book is …

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… Kunstformen der Natur (Artforms of Nature), its copyright has just expired and you can admire it on Wikimedia Commons [Kunstformen der Natur] or download it here. The pdf file has more than 260 megas with high-res amazing pictures.

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I got quite interested, primo because I find very attracting the art that exists behind the nature forms, secondo it is quite nice to see works from the past, as Visions de l’an 2000 (Visions of the year 2000) or Seurat vai à Rússia…, where jeraman got inspired by the colored photography by Prokudin-Gorskii of the beginning of 20th century.

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After hours and hours admiring the wonderful collection of illustrations, I had the idea to select some pictures and transform them in sprites to be used in artificial life simulation softwares or games. I think it would give an impressive and beautiful result for those systems.

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So, I list below the steps I followed to transform the images:

1. Copied the image from the book
2. Pasted in Adobe Flash
3. Modify -> Bitmap -> Trace bitmap
4. Most used threshold 100, some cases 50 and Color limit 25
5. Removed the background and unwanted stuff
6. Exported as PNG

As a result, I present the pictures in the gallery:

Kunstformen der Natur