Customer Reviews

Nautical Illustrations: 681 Permission-Free Illustrations from Nineteenth-Century Sources (Dover Pictorial Archive)

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

 

 

While this book was incredibly beautiful to look at, it's not going to be easy finding uses for this clip art. Since I usually use Dover books for collage, rubber stamping and art purposes this wasn't so great for me. The images are so VERY detailed that most of the engravings are dark and shades of gray. They are finished pieces of art in their own way (not good for collage or taking parts of the image out to combine with other things.)

I would only recommend this book for people who are looking for inspiration for drawing water or ships. These detailed pen drawings are really beautiful, just way more detailed than most clip art books. It is possible that you could still use these images for collage on a large scale, but you can't shrink most of these images without making them black (too small of lines.) This over-sized book (9.5" x 12") has such large images, many pages only having 2 or 3 images on them.

Really nice reference material for artists, lots of beautiful line drawings showing ships in fair, stormy, and even arctic weather. Some images in it are very small though, pretty much useless, but I guess if all they do is fill some white space then why not have them.

I really like this book - the etchings are well detailed and beautifully reproduced. The sea rescue series (#551 & #552) are so dramatic and really capture the danger and the power of the sea. Can't wait to use some of these images!

My daughter has enjoyed all the books I ordered. She is an artist so the books have been very handy.