Clip Art Books

Someone handed this off to me in the shop and it is certifiably pretty lame. Cartoony, hardly tattoo-looking (shading anyone?) and just plain goofy. Never even looked at the CD, as the book was proof enough that it was dumb.

I SUPPOSE one could redraw the ideas into something viable and cool, or you could just find the original Jerry pieces from which these were homogenized from.

WEAK. Save your money.

This book has a good selection of classic tattoo designs, and I would consider it a good value for the price. The artwork is good, not amazing, but certainly adequate. Each design is offered in color and in linework. If you're looking for a good, all-purpose book of flash, and not necessarily a lot of authentic Sailor Jerry stuff, this book (and CD ROM!) is a good choice.

I bought this for my husband, for his new hobby. We appreciate the CD to make the pictures "flash friendly". And the book has many different old and new patterns.

I bought this book expecting to find "old school" tattoo flash and could have not have been more disapointed. It took me all of five minuets to repackage this book for a return.
The examples are cartoony at best, more like temporary tattoos for a child than a good reference for an adult.
Stick with Sailor Jerry

Book arrived fast. The book was helpful but I wish the quality of the images were a little better.

Nice collection of clipart, but no associated names, sort of like a collection of Scottish Tartans with no clan names

Pitifully low resolution for the vast majority of the designs, and the high(er) res images were poorly scanned copies.

This is not what I've come to expect from Dover.

Did not include many well-known kamon.

I just love this Japanese motif book and CD Rom. I mainly use this book to lay out quilt designs, add the Japanese motifs for my address labels and letter heads. You can transfer the designs onto graph paper for cross stitching or needlepoint.
Having the CD Rom to print out these motif designs is just the best thing. It sure beats manually tracing the designs onto graph paper to enlarge the motifs. All you need to do now is put the CD into your computer, copy, adjust the size of the motif and print. Dover truly makes the best clip arts for your projects.

Nice images of the classic shorebirds were a pleasing treat for me; however, the quality of the images were lower than expected. Yet this gave me freedom to design my images using these as outlines into something that I can truly say is my art. A nice Dover Clipart Book of life in this realm.

I was very disapointed in this book. I expected a lot of clip art of different sea creatures, but instead the book only has a few species in a lot of different sizes.

These illustrations are very crude and in my opinion badly drawn. It might be right for some projects, but wasn't what I wanted at all.

...this collection of Mallory Pearce's excellent illustrations includes a CD-ROM with the book's graphics saved in BMP, EPS, GIF, JPEG, PICT, and TIFF formats. Have fun with the shore birds, crustaceans, mollusks, echinoderms, Porifera, Coelenterata (I looked the last two up), and flora! Great to use on faxes, letters, and envelopes. This may turn out to be my favorite Dover clip art + CD-ROM collection since "Food and Drink Illustrations" ISBN: 0486999440.

This is the first book of its type that I have picked up. I pretty much stumbled upon it at a local book store. Not sure why previous reviews rated it so low. I think this is pure design gold! Full of great ornamental clip art. Yeah if it comes with no CD but you can scan in the stuff, you can trace it or even create your own inspired by the many examples this book includes. 2,600 to be exact. I think this book is great! I can see using this book as inspiration for years to come.

I was quite disappointed with this collection. There is a significant amount of mid 19th century work in here, which is difficult to use - if a use could be found for it.

No cd-rom included. You'll have to scan whatever you want to use. Not a huge deal, however some of the ornaments in here are quite small and the resulting scans will be of somewhat low quality.

Christian Symbols CD-ROM and Book (Dover Electronic Clip Art)
comes up short, ordinary holiday symbols for children is not included

It doesn't contain the variety that i had hoped for, but for the price, this is a book of good resource.

I have not used this set much yet but that is because my current project requires color and this set is all black and white. It is, however, a nice set.

The quality of the images is good. They people who organized them seemed to have some basic knowledge of the traditional iconography. The art comes with a book that has all the images making it easier to find what you are looking for. All in all, it is well planned.

There are gaps and omissions but this is a nice resource, especially for the price.

I says high res CD, but they are low res scans where the dpi was raised to 600. The book is better to scan as the images are nice, but small. I would never purchase a product from this book company again.

im on the fence about this one...it has lots of artwork, but hte art on the disk are clearly scans, and not even great ones- they didnt bother to use descreen filers. this is also a very old product, and there were 3-4 corrupted files on the disc, which took some work to figure out exactly which ones.


the worst thing however, is that it is simply a picture book- there is no description of ANY of them. i wanted to know why certain animals and elements were used, and i am left to search ou t yet another book like this for satisfaction. know you waht, im giving this a 2, a 3 is too good. update this book NOW.

These Dover book/CD ROMs are a graphic designers delight. It's so hard to find good quality graphics that are royalty free, and not end up spending a fortune. Dover has a good selection of royal free images that are presented in a book and are on CD ROM.

I Run three history groups on MSN and I love to have beautiful pages for people when they visit. The images in the CD ROM is in full colour and so dazzling. Over 250 large images in TIFF format. Sharp images ready to use. Great for Paint Shop PRO. You don't have to scan, the images are there. You don't have to install some program. Just open them from you CR Rom Drive.

This is a collection of authentic coat coats of arms of royal families, institutions, guilds, towns, and cities of Europe, perfect for any Medieval Web site, teaching site or history site.

Simply worth every penny.

This book is half filled with images, none of which have any descriptions as to which tribe the graphics are from. I am very dissapointed because this book is useless to me as an art teacher. If you want a good book on Tribal designs and motifs, check out another resource by Dover, titled, 'Ready-to-Use North American Indian Motifs.' It has 10 x's more graphics and each image is explained as far as tribe and geographical region.

I do gourd pyrography and wanted a source of Indian designs to use in my pyrography. This book contains a nice selection and each group of designs includes an explaination of the design and when it was used.

There are notes for each page of designs detailing where the item was found and to what tribe they belong. There are also notes at the bottom of each "design" page. The information IS here.

I highly recommend this paperback book to anyone who has an eye either for graphic art or rural Americana. At first glance you might wonder what all the fuss is about fruit crate labels, then one particular illustration from Carol Grafton's brilliantly colored collection of 92 designs catches your eye and you are hooked.

As the concise yet historically accurate summary points out on the first page, these colorful, often whimsical, labels were affixed to wooden shipping crates of produce until the mid 1950's when they were replaced by more standardized cardboard boxes. For someone who grew up in agricultural America (as I did) these pictures are nostalgically evocative of a time and place that is disappearing fast. My favorites from this book are the multicolored duck representing Duckwall brand pears from Hood River, Oregon, a pelican made of lettuce, and a Strathmore bagpipe player (who knew there were Scots in Strathmore?).

Many of these same labels have been featured in an exhibit by the California Historical Society in San Francisco (because the lithographers were from local graphic design businesses) and on Antiques Roadshow. Thousands of the original labels themselves can still be purchased at fairly low cost (try internet sites) but this book includes many that are no longer available and so is a good introduction to collecting.

My only regret about this book is that all the pictures couldn't have been the half page size that many are and that there could have been twice as many of them; I would have gladly paid the price. As it is, this volume is an excellent introduction to crate art for a very low price. Maybe there will be a Volume II.

I thought that I was ordering two books with different crate label art in them. I looked at the covers and they looked like different books. In fact the only thing that is different about them is the cover. It was all just a waste of money.

There is definetely no shortage of color in Ms Grafton's book; the illustrations and color on the labels is absolutely stunning. However, I did encounter significant difficulty when using the labels for the purpose of decoupage. First, the paper they are printed on is of a flimsy quality causing the ads to wrinkle & form air bubbles; thus, gluing any of the ads on a surface was very difficult. Second, the ads are too big and too wide. I would have appreciated ads of all variety of sizes, but many are just too big to glue on smaller or narrow boxes. A decoupage expert may know how to handle this kind of paper, but not a beginner.

Unlike the first reviewer who gave this book 1 star, this is actually an excellent book showing designs taken from one of the many complex arts and crafts traditions of Japan. These are actual designs from stencils, which were carefully cut from mulberry paper and used for printing designs on cloth.The stencils are called katagami. Some of these are still being made, and by the fine traditional craftsmen of Japan working with simple, traditional tools to produce amazing patterns. The first reviewer has not bothered to look carefully into Japanese art forms, and so is, I believe speaking from ignorance. Not a book for tatoo designs, granted, but I think most people who would like design references from a somewhat obscure Japanese art tradition would find this book of interest. If you'd like more detail on the art tradition of stencil cutting or carving, you might want to look at
"Carved Paper: The Art of the Japanese Stencil." You can also see an example with some explanations here: http://www.sohe.wisc.edu/depts/hlatc/pixelsexhibit/katagami.html
Although these stencils were/are made for the purpose of dyeing cloth, they can be considered artforms in their own right. (I own a couple of these.) The Dover book is a nice reference.

As a previous reviewer has noted, Clarence Hornung's "Traditional Japanese Stencil Designs" is not the book to purchase if you are seeking inspiration for tattoos. It is, however, of exceptional value if your interests include Japanese aesthetics in general and textile motifs in particular or if you are seeking sophisticated patterns that can be manipulated and reproduced as graphic designs.

The stencils included were originally designed for monochromatic printing on cotton textiles but are also typical of the patterns imprinted on deer-skin goods and traditional Japanese wrapping papers. More than any other volume in Dover's generously-sized library of books on Japanese design, Hornung's testifies to the Japanese genius for manipulating a few design elements into subtle and classically beautiful patterns. Some of the patterns are abstract and without specific meaning, but the overwhelming majority are rich in symbolism. Hornung's introduction discusses the most important of these symbolic meanings. However, the usefulness of the introduction is compromised by his failure to number the stencils and then identify for the reader precisely which plates represent each thematic motif.

If you are at all trying to find sources for Japanese art, this is NOT the place to do it! Not only are the designs in the book non-Japanese they are worthless if you are using them for illustration or any reference to draw from. If you are looking for a source book for tattooing like I was, this is not it. To say this book was weak is a compliment. The biggest waste of money I've spent in a long time!

This book is a helpful tool when working on American Indian art. I used it to do some designs in my kitchen and they look really great and liven up the room.

This is a book of black and white graphics only. No pictures of how some of the designs were used. Mostly north west designs. No graphs. Your on your own with this one.