Craft Book Review: Dover Publications Clip Art with CD-ROM

So often I see a cute craft with a great image- I’m particularly attracted to vintage images such as old-timey postcard. While at the Country Living Fair recently, I saw a lot of Halloween decorations with these types of images, and realized it was time to dig out the “Old-Time Halloween Illustrations” by Dover Publications that I’d bought this summer and give it a whirl.

You may be asking, why do I need clip art? Well, most importantly, it gives you copyright-free images to use as you will. This is SO important if you are planning to sell, publish, or share your work online. Secondly, these images can be re-sized and printed out on any paper you like. You also have the flexibility to alter the image by printing in black and white, or flipping the image vertically or horizontally. Lots of options.

Back in the “old days,” I used to cut up clip art books to make calendars for my nursing home residents. The only “bad” thing was that you ended up cutting the books into Swiss cheese and wasting money. These new versions from Dover allow you to either go “old school” and use the images straight from the book or as a “Preview” for using the CD-ROM.

Nice selection of single images, ones in frames, some with sentiments.

This particular one has awesome vintage postcard images.

The CD-ROM is right in the back of the book, and this one contains 178 royalty-free images.

Since I love to have my cake and eat it too, I’m going to take you through my process of selecting an image and printing it out,  including some screen shots so you know what to expect. I popped open the CD drawer and soon the CD ROM fired up. I followed the installation prompts and was ready to go.

Pop up screen upon loading.

The screen that you see has a preview of your images, as well as icons for previewing, flipping, etc.

Once you select your image, you can modify it a little, such as converting to black and white, resizing, and changing the color spectrum. I chose an image, and it seemed small- so I enlarged it to 125%.

Print preview screen.

I also like that you can choose to print near the edge of the page or in the middle. Nice option if you need some white space. Now, I’m going to admit that on my first run with this I could not figure out how to print multiple images per page. Wasteful, yes, but I was on a timeline for a project & didn’t have time to work that out.

After printing out my image, I realized it might be too big. So I printed it out at the original size and compared the two.

While the photo isn’t great, the edges and lines of the enlarged image is still nice and clean. Next I printed out some of the cute postcards- take a look:

I have to admit, this is about the point when I got too excited to go start crafting to play with the program any more. So printed off a few more and headed up to my studio. Wanna see what I made? Well, my dear crafty friends, that’s another post for another day!

Time for the low-down:

Pros:

• cool images
• copyright/royalty free
• able to resize
• have your images to preview or color copy, AND still have them on disk!
• Lots of books/images to choose from. Dover has an amazing library.

Cons:

• Might be a little intimidating to new users- no instructions on using the CD-ROM in the book but they are online.
• Price point of $22.95 might be a little steep, but it’s a good investment.
• Might be difficult to find in stores. Try Amazon.com or fine bookstores.

Disclosure:- independent review, no material connection to the company.

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Chief Craft Test Dummy, Craft Evangelist, Founder, Editor, bottle-washer, trouble-maker, and creative whirlwind.

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