A Spring Kit: Part 5

Finally, the Butterflies.

They're definitely another of our strongest suites here at DoverPictura. Over the years we've really tried to expand our offerings in this department, both in terms of broadening the selection of butterflies (more unique images), but we've also tried to expand the types of image files that we serve up, to better suit our customers needs. A great example is Photoshop Brushes & Creative Tools: Butterflies (0486990583), 163 unique butterfly images.

Instead of furnishing the images as individual files–like JPGs, we've converted them into Photoshop Brushes or Photoshop Custom Shapes. These files are easily loaded into Photoshop or Photoshop Elements, and are then usable as brushes or vector shapes. You might ask why this method is preferable to JPGs or TIFs.  Used as brushes the images can take on an incredibly painterly quality that you just can't easily get using more conventional files types, The Brush Presets palette in Photoshop allows you to dramatically expand the expressive qualities of each butterfly image, and allows you to scatter, colorize, rotate and otherwise 'tune' the brush's marks. The image below is a gallery sample from this collection that illustrates some of the qualities of these brushes in use.

Another interesting collection is Chinese Butterfly Clip Art for Machine Embroidery (0486991121), 400 color and B&W images.

Don't let the title fool you—it's not only for machine embroidery! With this collection our intention was to prepare images for crafters who create their own machine embroidery patterns. Now, these aren't the sewable patterns themselves, rather, it is clip art that is optimized for the making of those patterns. Anybody who has ever tried making a design from their own scanned image knows just how frustrating it can be to clean up an image so that it's usable with programs like PE Design, SewWhat Pro, or Embird. With this collection we've done the drudgery, so that you get right to the fun part. But the fantastic images in this collection are also great for any other kind of crafting project that you have in mind–the images are saved as regular JPG files, that can be used with any of your other image-editing or layout software programs. Below is a typical image sheet from this collection, showing color variations (you get an image file for each variation).

And finally, we get to the old standards—the garden-variety butterflies.  Each of these collections features beautiful entomological renderings of butterflies (and moths). Typically, the images come to us from chromolithographically printed works, many from the late 19th century. The variety of images is truly astounding, and the number of images in each collections really gives you an incredible value.

Butterflies and Moths (0486996271), 490 color images.

Butterflies (0486998088), 235 color images.

Full-Color Decorative Butterfly Illustrations (0486999661), 388 color images.

http://www.doverpictura.com/collection/0486990583