Customer Reviews

Fantasy Clip Art: Everything You Need to Create Your Own Professional-Looking Fantasy Artwork

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I was going to buy this book when I saw it in a local bookstore. I decided against it, however, when I read the highly restrictive license the authors/publishers placed the book and CD under.

Basically, I'm prohibited from using any derivative works I create with this book for any reason, any time, without paying royalties. So, if I really like the look of the _arm_ of one of the characters in the book and attach it to a character of my own creation in one frame in my 30 page, 180-frame comic, I'm screwed.

Other clip art books (e.g., Dover) wisely note that the clip art is for actual use, and as long as I don't try to sell their clip art in a clip art book (thereby competing directly), or make a derivative work that is mostly their stuff, they allow me free use of the art I purchase. Unfortunately, Crossley (or his publisher) doesn't understand the purpose of clip art books, and sadly places his "valuable" intellectual property safely out of my reach in any practical way.

Thanks, but no thanks.

I like it, it's a good resource, except for the following.

I ordered this damned book new, and it has a sharpie mark on the bottom of it, and the license is way too restrictive

This book purports to serve two separate purposes: teaching non-experts to colorize digital clip art and providing the reader with a collection of fantasy clip art templates. Since I don't need the clip art, I purchased the book solely to learn the techniques for digitally coloring clip art with Photoshop. Since the first part of the book attempts to explain several techniques for doing so, I eagerly jumped into the tutorials section and began trying to closely follow them. I have used Photoshop for many, many years (non-professionally), and I consider myself a mid-level to semi-expert user. However, I had an extremly hard time following many of the author's tutorials. Many of them leave out important steps that a fairly new Photoshop user will almost surely have trouble with. Even worse, there are some hugely beneficial techniques for doing the colorizing that the author doesn't even mention, much less use (e.g., using selections to control the colorization). Thus precisely following the tutorials (which I at first did) led to more difficulty than necessary. Don't let me confuse you -- I have used the clipart and the tutorials to produce several really cool art pieces that I'm quite proud of. However, it has taken me lots and lots and lots of deciphering of several tutorial steps to see what the author was really trying to teach me, and I'm not even now sure that I grokked his techniques or simply created my own hybrid techniques. After spending many hours with the book, the CD, and Photoshop, I'm convinced this book was published mostly to sell the author's clip art, not to teach the reader the techniques of coloring clip art. The included clip art is indeed impressive, cool, and fun to experiment with. (Unfortunately, one of the main art pieces showcased in the book isn't included on the CD.) If you need/want the clip art -- or to see how multilayered clip art can be created in Photoshop, the book is a good buy; but if you want to learn to color clip art, you can find much better books for that purpose.

This book provides a wealth of top-quality fantasy art resources which can be used for all sorts of creative projects - including board, card and even video games. It's a really attractive book to own, with top quality color printing throughout. If you know your way around Photoshop, but don't have the talent to create artwork for yourself then this book is a complete gold mine.