Tuesday, March 19, 2013


Easter— Greatest Hits!






















A thorough survey of all of the DoverPictura collections revealed a shocking truth—we have no Easter collection! Well, no pure Easter collection anyway… All I can promise you is that this is going to change—perhaps not in time for this Easter, but definitely by 2014. That said, we actually have some very nice Easter images tucked away in various collections and I’m going to use this blog to show you around some of them.
         The great news is that you can now buy images by the image sheet. This allows you to pick and choose among the individual sheets that comprise a collection, and just buy the ones that you want at that moment. By the way, here’s a great feature that’s available to registered users of DoverPictura—say you buy a couple of image sheets from a collection, and later on you decide that you like it so much you just have to buy the whole thing.  If you’re a registered user go to My Collections and locate the list of image sheets that you’ve already bought, beside it you’ll see a button that says: Complete Collection for $XXX. You won’t have to pay the full collection price—just the difference between what you’ve already paid and the full price! That’s a great deal.

The above image is from Carol Grafton’s Treasury of Greeting Card Designs, http://www.doverpictura.com/collection/0486997324

This collection includes some fantastic Easter card-making materials. By my count there are five image sheets, and they contain a total of 41 images. The collection contains eight vintage cards, like the one above. And there are some really cool vignettes that can be combined with one another to make great custom cards.            
                        











Another full color collection with some great vintage images is Full-Color Holiday Vignettes, http://www.doverpictura.com/collection/0486995062.
In this collection you’ll find 57 color Easter images on four image sheets, all from the original, rare chromolithographs. This is classic Victorian scrap!
























What says Happy Victorian Easter better than bunnies, chicks, pussywillows and decorated eggs?

A great collection for making labels or for coloring is Whimsical Animal Illustrations, http://www.doverpictura.com/collection/0486999734



















The images are high-resolution B&W line art– that means you can print them out big and let the kids color them. Many of the pictures are formatted to be used as labels or signs– print these ones small, color them and use them as labels. I didn’t do an Easter image count, but there are lots of cute rabbits, chicks, and ducks (and a lot of other great animals) in this collection.

And finally, here's a list of some other great collections that you might want to check out for Easter motifs (lots of animals, children and Christian imagery).

Mammals                                          
http://www.doverpictura.com/collection/0486996387   
Animal Silhouettes                             
http://www.doverpictura.com/collection/0486995577 
Wild and Domestic Animals             
http://www.doverpictura.com/collection/0486995232            
Victorian Vignettes                            
http://www.doverpictura.com/collection/0486995437           
Full-Color Old-Time Children   
http://www.doverpictura.com/collection/0486995534            
Vintage Holiday Cuts                       
http://www.doverpictura.com/collection/0486998290            
Photoshop Brushes–Holidays 
http://www.doverpictura.com/collection/0486990907            
Dore’s Life of Jesus                             
http://www.doverpictura.com/collection/0486996506            
Paintings of the Life of Jesus            
http://www.doverpictura.com/collection/0486998991


















Monday, March 11, 2013

What the heck is DoverPictura anyway?

DoverPictura is an unrivaled source of rare collections of royalty-free digital graphics. We take a highly geeky approach to collecting, organizing and selling our graphics, and in this, we've taken our lead from the folks who started Dover, Hayward and Blanche Cirker. 
      The Cirkers were collectors extraordinaire, insatiably curious over a vast spectrum of subjects– and they were hopeless bibliophiles. They surrounded themselves with sharp minds, with sharp eyes, and through these folks' tireless efforts were able to acquire an enormous collection of the most curious and eclectic graphic materials, which are housed in what we all call– the Archive. The Archive combines the feel of the stacks of a venerable old library, a crazy old hoarder's attic and the chaotic sprawl of a Saturday afternoon ephemera show. 

It kind of looks like this, but a little dustier and without the nice ceilings.....


The best news is that, like an iceberg, you're only seeing about 10% of what we've got— great things lie below the surface…the best is yet to come... 


Every week curators are dispatched into the Archive for the sole purpose of distilling (to confuse the metaphor further) the most delicious, ambrosial extractions.  At DoverPictura, we don't focus solely on individual images, we think and organize in compendiums, taxonomies—veritable treasure chests! We believe that the presentation of individual images within a context of it's peers (however that may be construed) can be a great goad to creativity, and helps to engender a rich creative ferment. For you, the image-addict, this means that when you come to the site you're always going to find fresh and fascinating new constellations of images for your crafts and graphic arts projects. 


Here's a sampling of a few of the collections we hope to have coming your way sometime soon:
Images extracted from Gaspard Lavater's somewhat bizarre treatise from 1820, conflating human and animal face types, 'The Art of Knowing Men by Their Faces'. That bunny page is looking pretty good heading into Easter…



































A rare portfolio collection of Chinese and Burmese tea crate labels. You'll not be finding these elsewhere.







A superb collection of old Moravian (Slovakian and Czechish) patterns. Most probably these were used for embroidery making, but because many of these are repeatable we think that they're are going to very useful in all sorts of graphic applications.










Well, that's all for this time out. I'll be posting again soon!


Welcome to the DoverPictura Blog!

DoverPictura.com sells all of the incredible digital graphics, clip art and fine art images that were previously only available in Dover's book & CD publications – instantly, by download.

Our objective in creating the online store has been to improve your shopping experience—hopefully, we've done this in several ways. DoverPictura.com makes it easy to:

  • Find exactly the kinds of images that you want.
  • Buy just the images that you need.
  • Never lose or misplace the images you've bought.

Find what you want.
Finding the images and graphics that want has never been easier! You can search the DoverPictura online store in several ways: by entering keywords in the search bar you can view both collections and individual image sheets containing the type of images you're looking for. If you're in a more casual mode, say you kind of have a feel for what you're looking for, but you wouldn't mine being surprised a bit by something else, then browse the categories list. 
 Another big plus of the website is that there's no more guessing which images you'll find in a collection! In the olden days (like about 12 months ago) if you looked at one of our books at an online bookseller you'd usually only be able to see a few of the images that were in that book and on the cd. At the DoverPictura online store you can browse all of the images in any collection—before you make the decision to buy.
 Also, if you want to find out what's newest from our collectors and authors, or simply what's most popular, check out the scrolling collections at the bottom of the front page of the store. 

Buy just what you need.
Now you have two ways to buy images from any collection. First, you can buy the full collection (usually between 100 and 1500 images), or you can choose to buy by the 'image sheet'. Image sheets are the equivalent of one or two pages from a collection; typically they contain between one and twenty images.

Never go hunting for a misplaced CD again! Register with My Collections on the site and we'll see to the safe keeping of all of your collections. Each time you purchase images from DoverPictura we'll place those images in your own private 'cloud-based' collection. You can download them all immediately, or pick and choose as you need them–the best part is that can download whenever and as often as you like.

Happy shopping!