Rose Frames

Some of the best vintage tag and frame images come from the title pages and forwards of old books. I find it quite interesting that at a time when it could be quite expensive to include anything other than text in books, that so many publishers opted to make bold and impressive front matter like this.

The book was published in 1918 by Prof. Dr. Theobald Ziegler in German. Godsdienst En Godsdiensten, at least according to Gutenberg.org is in the public domain in the United States. Best I can tell, the title translated to Religion of Religions. It probably means something slightly different than that, but that’s good enough for me.

Anyway, what I’ve got for you today is one of those page frame images that’s just full of wonderful roses, leaves, vines and even an urn. The potted rose rambles around the frame to create a wonderfully dramatic print.

With a lot of patience, there’s tons of little spaces, this rose frame could be colorized quite nicely. You could use a layer of color wash and make it look a bit like the vintage book illustrations that were hand colored with watercolor paint too. Or, you could colorize the entire piece to make the original black lines a different color; which is what I’ve done for you.

I’ve included the original rose frame as it was scanned from the book as well as two color variations to get you started. I’ve shrunk the blue and red rose background versions down to fit on a 4 X 6 size piece of card stock.

I also suspect with a bit of clever editing you could turn sections of the rose vines into repeating patterns as well. But, I’ll leave that up to someone feeling more ambitious than I am today.