Customer Reviews

Dragons and Wizards CD-ROM and Book (Dover Electronic Clip Art)

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I enjoy quality clipart. In particular, I enjoy fantasy clipart. This book and CD includes almost 200 samples of fantasy-styled clipart (royalty free to use at your leisure!). Many of them remind me of the 1979 Hobbit and Lord of the Rings movies - in both the good aspects, and the bad. I did rate this product four stars, and there is a reason for this - some of the included clipart, despite not having a vector-based copy on the disk (the EPS is raster-, not vector-based), is absolutely top notch. It has that old school charm that reminds those of us old enough to remember of the Hobbit animated movie from the 70's and the matching LOTR. They are rounded, low on detail, but high on quality. These clipart samples do not include heavy hatching and shading, but they do include a nice soft and rounded artistic style that screams to be used.

The quality of many of them is excellent, in an admittedly simplistic style. Unlike many of Dover's other clipart books and CDs, these are on the simple side of the detail level, but they are very inventive nonetheless. They provide a nice level of male and female subjects (most in a wizardly style) and some beasties are thrown into the mix. In particular, you will find a nice selection of Asian (?Chinese?) dragons in various styles, shapes and poses. There is a small sample of Aztec "dragonesk" creatures also.

Overall, a very large portion of the art is very nice. However, the product looses a star due to a few poorly drawn samples which are very sub-par when compared to their fellows. Mind you, this is only a very few of the nearly 200 samples. This does not corrupt nor reduce the great quality of the other samples, it just smacks a little of low-grade filler.

To be honest, I purchased this book & CD-ROM mostly for the Wizard images. It contains a decent amount of Wizards and other magical characters. About 66% of the book contains dragon designs. A small portion of the dragon section contains European dragons, however the majority of dragons included in this book are Asian. I would have given it 5 stars if only this collection included more European dragon designs and more detailed image descriptions. I also found a few but really nice medieval Sorceress images that I will definitely implement in my designs. Overall, the added CD-ROM with 6 different image formats makes this a very useful resource. The fact that all images in this collection are permission-free makes this a great buy.

I ordered this book and a book called Dragons:A Book of Designs. When I recieved them I flipped through this one and was happy with the selection of images. When I started to look through Dragons:A Book of Designs, I was sorely disappointedDragons: A Book of Designs (Dover Pictorial Archive Series). Everything in the Dragons...Designs book was in the Dover Dragons and Wizards book except the Wizards one had additional media in it. I feel like I paid twice for the same book. This is the Better of the Two Duplicate Books.

If you want line drawings of dragons and wizards and don't want to try to draw them yourself (or aren't talented enough, like me) this is a great book. The CD rom is great because you can print the things out.

I've been looking for design motifs to use in craft projects, particularly polymer and metal clays. This book has a number of fantastic dragons, but the wizards, for my purpose anyway, were a little too "cute."