Tolkien Art Index

Colophon

This site is hosted by the inestimable pair Networks , which the author has used enthusiastically for more than 20 (yes, twenty) years.

Most of the HTML source files were created as exported calculation fields from a FileMaker database purpose-built by the author. The author has used FileMaker with unbridled … resignation for nearly 30 (yes, thirty) years.

Those HTML files (such as this one) which were created by hand were done so with BBEdit , which the author used for creating his first web page in 1993. It doesn’t suck.®

Images were scanned with an Epson GT-20000 flatbed scanner which the author cannot remember why he purchased a decade or more ago, but is very glad that he did. The author is not so foolish as to use the software that came with the scanner, however; no, instead he uses the infinitely better (though still slightly cumbersome) VueScan by Hamrick Software, which he’s been supporting since the late 1990s.

De-skewing, cropping, and scaling was all done with Lemke Software’s GraphicConverter . Yes, the author has been using this flexible and constantly-updated software for over 20 (twenty) years.

Most color correction and simulated de-acidification of yellowed paper has been done with Lemkesoft’s Xe8472 software, which the author was unaware had been discontinued (at least as a Final Cut Pro plug-in) until just this moment. It’s too bad, too, because by the last few dozen images, he’d even figured out how to use it well!

Since the thumbnails are so small, the author took the liberty of “cleaning up” the artwork a bit before generating them — so that it would be more visible at such a small scale. Most of the erasures of dots, scratches, spilled ink, and over-writing-of-the-images-with-text was accomplished with Pixelmator , which at six years is a relative newcomer to the author’s toolkit.

And if you’re a web developer who uses Macintosh and you don’t yet use Kornel Lesiński’s ImageOptim , shame on you! This magic tool will shrink your .jpg, .png, and other images losslessly with drag-and-drop simplicity.

Transmit moves the finished product up to pair Networks without a hitch, but sometimes the author uses the current version of Fetch , which (again) he’s been using since the mid-1990s.

The astute and knowledgable will have noticed that the author must have been using Apple’s Macintosh computers since at least the early ’90s. Indeed, he purchased his first Macintosh (a PowerBook Duo 230 ) in 1992 (his employer bought the matching Duo Dock), though he’d been using Macintoshes since 1984. His first Apple computer was an original “ Apple ][ ” (expanded to a whole 48 KB!) he purchased with a loan co-signed by his dad when he was a junior in high school, in 1980. The author isn’t up to the higher math involved in figuring out just how long ago that was.

All images by J.R.R. Tolkien are copyright © The Tolkien Estate Limited or © The Tolkien Trust. The omission of greeting cards and jigsaw puzzles from the above list of sources is intentional.