Clip Art Books

A decent collection of images and fair range of subjects. Not as comprehensive as A. Mookerjee's 5,000 Designs and Motifs, but not as expensive either, and the designs are usually larger than those in Mookerjee's book.

I bought about 20 of the Dover book/CD series and I'm discovering that the files on CD vary a lot in their usability.

These designs are gorgeous, a beautiful selection. The colours and designs range from rich and sumptuous to subdued depression-era like your Grandma's linoleum floors.

My beef, though, is that most of the files on this CD aren't cropped to be repeating patterns. They are usually bigger than a full repeat on the original wallpaper or whatever, so with some fiddling about in Photoshop you CAN fill a large area. If you try using most of the files as-is though, for example as a background on a website, you'll find there's overlap. You'll have to manually crop to find the repeating edges of the design - and even then, some are slightly crooked so it's a difficult task. A task that, in my opinion, should have been done already by the Publishers for a product of this type.

Other books in this same series have had a lot more care taken in producing the files, so if you're looking for easy-use designs, go for ones in the series that specify "Repeating" allover patterns. This isn't one of them.

Having said that, some of these are actually my favourite designs out of the series so far, so it still may be a worthwhile investment if you have the time to fiddle with files.

kat black =^..^= retrokat.com

this book have alot of options for textile design this patterns are classical but you can find easily patterns that are modern even today very easy to use on graphic program not a vektor patterns but still very esay for many colorways

Overall a solid resource book. However I find it missing some of more useful elements, such as plain realistic images of body parts or full body images in different poses. It contains a lot of imagery but they afre of more vintage/anatomical nature. So in this respect the book is a bit limiting.

Although this book is devoid of any prickings, patterns, or line drawings it is worth owning just for the sheer number (243 to be exact) of beautiful, close-up photos of antique laces. The photographs are quite clear enough, I believe, that the advanced lacemaker should be able to replicate many of the laces. And the novice lacer, like me, will enjoy thumbing its pages and dreaming of future projects.

This is a typical Dover book containing interesting and useful, but hard to find information in an economical format. This is not an instructional book; There is no text other than a reference to the century from which the numerpous examples come, nor are there layout or page examples. The print quality of my copy is somewhat pale and poorly aligned, but the illustrations are mainly large and the detail is easy to see for copy practice.

I purchased this book to use in our Book of the Fantastical and it proved highly useful. Great for publishers looking for good clip-art work.

The book introduces the basic types of tessellations and presents many examples. Note that the book title say "32 plates _to_ color" and not "32 color plates". The "look inside" feature shows already colored tessellations, but they are not in the book. It's not a problem, but don't expect to get color plates. This book is more geometric in its approach than "Principles of Pattern Design" by Proctor (isbn 0-486-26349-5) and may complement it nicely.

Page after page of creatures of myth and ancient culture, yet not a single name to go with the face (or fish, or stone carving, etc.). What a disappointment. As a picture book, its ok. As an art tool, its a bit frustrating. Many of the images are instantly recognizable, but many more are a mystery - I would have loved to see a brief notation stating where and when each of the creatures contained in this book originated. All told, if you just want a book of strange things to look at, this is for you. If you have any interest at all in what it is exactly that you are looking at, please pass this book over.

I purchased this book with the hope of viewing some very well designed graphics only to find that they are of poor quality; some of them resembling stick drawings by children. Definitely not worth the price since there's nothing really special about this particular `Pictura' series.
I was very disappointed, especially owning several CD editions of art from Dover which I simply loved.