Dragons and Wizards CD-ROM and Book

Rating:
Summary: Some truly marvelous icons of mysticism
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: A strangely unsatisfying collection.
Review: I rarely worry about buying a Dover permission-free art collection without examining it first, because the artwork inside is usually consistent with that on the cover. This is somewhat the case with this book, too, but it turned out to be a major disappointment. First of all, 32 of its 48 pages are devoted entirely to illustrations of dragons taken from historical sources. Many of these are striking in their way, but more than a few are useless for most illustration needs. Secondly, the wizards, who share the billing with dragons in the remaining sixteen pages, are, if they're men, all bearded with pointed hats. No apprentice wizards, no clean-shaven wizards, just the usual cliche wizards. (The female wizards are more interesting, which is a plus.) For the most part, the contemporary drawings are nicely done and this book will certainly be useful for those whose needs aren't too demanding. But the bottom line is that Dover is charging $14.95 (retail) for a very poorly thought out and lackluster collection, containing only sixteen pages of original art. I think they ought to be ashamed of themselves.