Two Clipart Sites

                     An article by Sue

In Issue 60, Steve Provost mentioned these two sites in a letter
which he sent in, and I said that this issue I would tell you a
bit more about them.

Clipart Castle

This can be found at http://www.clipartcastle.com/ and contains
thousands of free graphics under the headings animations, clip
art, backgrounds, buttons, bars, icons and 3D text. Other sections
cover fantasy graphics created with a package called Bryce 3D,
sci-fi related backgrounds, graphics and animations, Egyptian
themed art work, a section covering castles, and finally one
called the Mayan Collection.

The Bryce 3D fantasy gallery contains two main sections -
"Castles, Dragons, Knights, Ladies and Misc[ellaneous]", and "Myst
and Majick". Once you get into the "Castles." page, you'll find
several sub menus, each of which has links to the individual
graphics. The graphics have titles like "castle on hillside" and
"large fairytale castle, light blue sky"; there are 32 in all but
I must admit that I wasn't impressed by the quality of the ones I
looked at. Similarly there are 18 dragon graphics, 16 knights, 14
ladies, and 21 categorised under miscellaneous which have titles
like "a throne", "Death from above" and "Be afraid, be very
afraid".

Far better are the swords and sorcery GIFs in the clip art section
at http://www.clipartcastle.com/clipart.htm which have several
sub-sections.  Objects has five pages covering symbols, armour,
zodiac signs and the like.  Creatures has three pages for mythical
creatures, dragons and gargoyles.  People has two pages for male
and female fantasy figures. Selecting any of these options opens
the final menus where each graphic is listed by name and clicking
the name opens the graphic for you to save to your hard drive.
The names are pretty vague, such as heart or banner - and there
may be several with the same name (eg there are twelve called
'moon', thirteen called 'wizard' and a massive forty-one for
'knight') so it's a case of opening them to see if they're what
you want. The quality is mixed but there are some very worthwhile
images on there if you're prepared to look.

Sewdoll Fantasy Clip Art Collection

This is a subdivision of a GeoCities site and can be found at
http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Realm/4139/Fantasy2.htm

Navigation through here is much easier and I would rate the site
as superior to Clipart Castle both on content and layout. There
are 16 main sections (angels, castles, creatures etc), some of
which are subdivided (eg there are two sections for mermaids) if
there are a lot of entries. Selecting the item you want takes you
directly to the graphics themselves. These are displayed on the
page and you can just right-click on them to select and save them.
The graphics' artists are credited if known. Some of the graphics
are animated and all are of high quality.

The pages on this site load slower than those of Clipart Castle
because the graphics are on the main pages, but I think this
trade-off in time is well worth it because you don't have to
blindly stumbled through a load of vague titles to try to find the
graphic you want.

If you know of any similar sites, please write in!












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