Can anyone suggest a good source of clipart designed for engravers (ie no crossing lines). I need people (cartoon and outerwise) most. Thanks.
I can’t say I’ve found anything *specifically designed for engravers*; the ClickArt series is pretty good in the respect of both the way their images are created (most images have no intersecting lines) and in having a large selection of cartoon/people but no matter which commercial package you buy, you’ll probably need to do some editing before engraving. With the ClickArt series, the biggest bugaboo is the colors of their images; you’ll need to recolor a good bit of it to get a good b/w image approximating line art or to achieve a decent level of contrast to engrave well.
Another good source are the Dover clipart books, but of course those will need scanned and possibly traced (vectorized); I use Adobe’s Streamline most of the time but Corel’s Trace program works pretty well also. If you already have the CorelDraw suite Trace comes bundled with it for free … any version past Corel 8 does a nice job. I *prefer* to trace the scans to save disk space, as I delete the scan once I’ve got a good vector image, but in many cases you can use just the scan once you’ve cleaned up any extraneous spots or smudges.
There’s plenty of commercial art out there, including many exclusive collections that cost an arm and a leg, but many of the images in the higher-end collections will still require editing before being “tuned” just right to use for engraving.
In addition to all of the CorelDraw clipart, I also use Art Explosion. They have a great series of vectorized clipart. There are also lots of sources through Awards & Recognition Association’s search feature and book too. Of course, you have to be a member to access…
I second the use of Art Explosion. There is a lot of repetition, but for the price, it is a great source of pictures.
Take a look at the website for logofax for clipart. for the engravers and more.. everything is very clean and state of the art. art work. www.logofax.com.
Thanks for the link…. I’ll probably sign up for a month to see what’s on there! It’ll wind up being on my dollar, so it’s doubtful that I’ll sign up for the full year (the boss thinks I can draw / scan / digitize anything and - well, I pretty much can, so there’s no incentive to fork out $$$ for art). However, there IS some nice stuff shown there, especially the college fraternity/sorority crests - we do a ton of that kind of work. Thanks again!