Clip Art Books For Your Creative Adventures

Dover's collection of clip art books has seen some improvements over the years. They now almost exclusively include a CD of all of the images so they are ready for use. Some of my older Dover books do not include CDs, making their use a bit tedious. Dover also began doing full color books for certain publications.

These are some of my favorites for black and white line drawings, hotlinked to Dover's site.











Dover also carries a line of books with full color and vector images that can be resized. The Pictura series are extremely detailed and useful for even large scale projects.

Pictura includes books of design and art from most of the world's cultures and detailed books of buterflies, flowers, insects and various art styles.

Old world luxury home design, Clive Christian

Clive Christian is probably more well known for being the company that sells the world's most expensive bottle of perfume.

They also have a reputation for high end cabinetry based home interiors.

Most of their designs are based off of old world designs but done with a modern cabinetry layout scheme.

Something of note with most of their designs is that they incorporate three elements. Crystal chandeliers, lots of wood molding and mirrors. When you break that down these are relatively inexpensive materials available at any big box home improvement store.

Crown molding either stained or painted to match the walls is a fairly easy project even a beginner could tackle. Basic cabinets could benefit from added crown or base moldings stained to match. Front molding and finials are also readily available and could be added to the front of cabinet bases or open shelving. Crystal chandeliers can frequently be found at garage sales, flea markets and house fixture reuse stores. Walls can benefit from frames made of molding that are mounted to the wall. When doing so on a painted wall, painting the frames to match makes them look built in. The bedroom pictured could be mimicked using a love seat and two wardrobes. A used hotel furniture warehouse would be an idea source for a pair of matching wardrobes or armoires. The heavy use of mirrors is another features that is relatively easy to recreate. Standard unframed mirrors from a big box home improvement store could be installed on the wall and framed out with the finish moldings to blend into the wall.

Kitchen and conservatory, Practical Magic.

Sometimes the best part of a movie is the sets or the costuming. Over the years as we have searched for our perfect house I have had at least two requests, a large kitchen and a conservatory.

The house sets in the movie Practical Magic are wonderful examples of just that. Sadly, there was no real house used in the movie. It was all well conceived sets and a temporary facade.









The huge kitchen set from the movie. They never make kitchens big enough in real life.

Dining room wall decor

I found this dining room image at Architectural Digest. The wall behind the table has a high impact but look closer, it is a very simple design.

An iron curtain rod hung high on the wall with a tab top curtain(s) in a basic fabric is used as the back drop. The images are hung using a series of hooks or chain to suspend them from the rod.

The main piece of art is the painting in the middle. You could use a featured piece of art or even an art poster if it was well framed. The surrounding frames appear to have photos or ink drawings. All of this could be done on a theme such as one main work of art by an artist and then use smaller prints from the same artist in the other frames.

This would also be easy to do with a group of frames from a thrift store painted black and filled with small prints, art images scavenged from a calendar or cards with art fronts.
Image: Architectural Digest