Customer Reviews

Harter's Picture Archive for Collage and Illustration (Dover Pictorial Archive)

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If you are looking for unusual and striking Victorian clip art, then Jim Harter's picture archive book is it. I am an artist who uses mixed media in collage form and I can't get enough of these illustrations. There is everything from gothic Victorian scenes, to animals of every type and people using unusual objects.

I've had this book for years and it's provided endless crafting ideas and clip art all this time. Sturdy and well bound just like any Dover edition, plus the images are a refreshing break from the cutsie and poorly drawn stuff you'd get from a program like Publisher. So easy to scan in since the book will lay flat w/o the binding cracking.

The only thing better than this would be an edition that comes with a CD with the images pre-scanned like some of the newer Dover clip art library collections.

This book makes a fine collection to my book of arts. This helps you if you are into making art from images or imagination. They have samples in the book with images made out of many images found in the book. The cover of this book is made out of different images from the book, pretty much a copy and paste method. Detailed drawings black and white. Recommended for anyone who is into detailed ink art.

I checked this book out from the library years ago. It hooked me with its collage effects. I used it for my own gain then it became gone. I'm so glad to have my own copy now. The seller was great!

This book was a great purchase. I reference it often when deciding how to assemble an ink drawing. This book has many examples of truly black and white images. Many ink books I've purchased contain images that are hard to view just because the whole image is the same tone. Ink is a difficult thing to master, thus making contrast even more important than it would be in any other form of drawing or painting. This book contains images that are full of contrast and are not in any way difficult to view.

Dover publishes a lot of clip art archives, but this one is one of the best. Editor Jim Harter (an accomplished artist in his own right)selected a broad array of art across multiple categories. Want animals? In the mood for proper Victorian ladies and gents? Spiritualism and hypnotism? Mummies and shrunken heads? Toys and machines? Plants and planets? Masks and totemic tikis? They're here. While you'll recognize some of these images from advertisements and illustrations since they are public domain, I think you will appreciate not only the diversity but also the quality of the artwork here. Jim Harter designed a lot of posters and collages starting in the psychedelic era, and he's got a great eye for choosing evocative images that you can immediately incorporate into your colleges regardless of your style.

Harter also includes a few inspirational collages showing what can be done with the sources in the book, and he also shares some lovely backgrounds which can be very useful. His introductory remarks are brief but among the most useful I've seen on the topic.

I wish that Dover had gone the extra mile to include a CD-ROM with this book as they do with some of their mroe recent titles like "Steampunk Sourcebook." But since they haven't, it's no big deal to scan in the book yourself since all the images are contained in only around 90 pages. Every page is printed single-sided to prevent bleedthrough, but since the actual paper isn't the most opaque in the world, I recommend placing a sheet or two of clean, blank, newsprint-style paper behind each page you scan to minimize any chance of capturing a ghost of a subsequent page. It's worth the extra effort.

This is a book which I can clearly envision using for a very long time.

Amazingly stimulating...this book assisted me in improving both visual and verbal communication in my work. A true feast for the mind.