It is difficult to know how much people actually use full colour clipart. I believe more folk are budding artists and designers these days than is realised. We like to have a go ourselves with the various art packages that abound. What is apparent, however, is that plenty of people buy clips. Perhaps we hope to learn from them or to get new ideas, and, of course, if you are only printing in black and white, nothing is simpler than to convert colour clips to your requirements.
The latest offering in Matt Blackæs ClickArt series is so professional and so excellent that it is hard to find any fault with it. Originally produced in America for the Apple Mac, this package has been converted to drawfiles in beautiful colour and detail. The accompanying brochure is the original American glossy A5 size with full colour thumbnail pictures of each clip. It states that the graphics were created by a team of professional graphic artists. Any aspiring computer artist would do well to study some of these pictures to learn how to do it.
Matt Black, as the British distributors, have enclosed an A4 B/W leaflet which tells you all you need to know about using the clips with Acorn machines. It is also worth noting that the international licence agreement does allow you to use these illustrations for limited commercial purposes, e.g. in a newsletter, providing that what you are selling does not depend substantially upon the ClickArt clips for its value.
There are four floppy discs containing the 150 nature pictures and another with 120 silhouettes. Also included is the Freeware application !PickAPick for displaying the clips as thumbnails on your screen if you wish. On the other hand, the brochure is so helpful I could see no reason to burden my disc with !PickAPick. If you need a lion picture, you just look on page 17 and it shows you a super little picture and tells you which disc it is on.
I show it here for you to get an idea of the quality.
If, like me, you are concerned with the memory use of your images, say for dropping into other applications or for making animations, then you may also be reassured. The biggest image I could find was Globe 1 which was 43676 bytes in ClickArt Draw format. When dropped into Artworks and then re-exported as a drawfile, it reduced to 42892 bytes, just under 2% less! All the clips could be reduced slightly in this way, which is curious.
Most clips are between 20Kb and 27Kb in size. The Dingbats, which are also in colour, are very good on low memory. The cherries dingbat shown here takes only 1456 bytes. (There should be a joke about Ébytes of a cherryæ here somewhere but I canæt think how to put it!)
The drawings are so good and strong that they will stand being miniaturised to quite a reasonable degree without the lines disappearing. This makes them suitable for logos and other small images. The borders, silhouettes and dingbats are, of course, particularly suited for this kind of use. Neither are any of the files compressed, which makes them very quick to access and to use. I personally like the fact that none of the illustrations is either whimsical or cartoonish. We have quite enough of that type of clipart already. Hey ho, I suppose it is my age showing!
My only minor criticism is that a few of the colours in one or two pictures seem a little odd. These are almost certainly explained by the problems of porting to different computer systems. As it is easy to alter colours, it makes it more fun anyway to try and improve on the Dove, the Coast and the Trout, clips which I found slightly eccentric.
I suppose the main problem with using this set is that no-one will be able to kid anyone else that they produced them themselves, they are just too good!
This is excellent value at ú35 (no VAT) plus ú2 p&p from Matt Black.áThis includes a free educational site licence. uá
