It would be very remiss of me not to mention our very own Jon Hodgson's illodeli, purveyor of bespoke fantasy (and sci-fi and historical) clipart. It might not have what you need, but then again it might!

Joe Prince had a lot of success in going to Clipart.com.

He signed up for a week and then got as much as he wanted in that time frame. I don't know what they have specifically for old Chinese book/vase style art, but Joe found them very useful.

It might make sense to try that route for interior art if you are on a tight budget and tehn get a cover done by an artist. Or you may find a suitable image at Clipart.com, of course.

I'm in the middle of a weekly subscription to clipart.com, and indeed with a couple of exceptions have pretty much what I need. In fact I've got a couple of projects that I can do entirely with some of the very high quality images to be found there.

But its the stuff that turns up on Wikipedia commons as 72 dpi (ie. web images only) and repetitively in books I've got on Chinese Mythology that I'm trying to track down.

Regards

;O)Newt
D101games -An Imaginary Company

I knew I'd put a link to something in a thread a while ago... it's here.

Having said that, I think that working with an artist for a few well-chosen pieces will look classier than loads more clip-art.

But, for an unknown product where you want your initial investment to be as low as possible, I can understand where you are coming from, Newt.

I've bought a few of the Dover clipart book+CD sets - and then realised that most of them are up on clipart.com! (And that gets round the Dover limit of 10 items per book per project without paying extra.) The clipart.com stuff isn't always high resolution... but it was my main image source for Arsenal of Heaven, and more recently I raided it for the Whistlestop Guide to Herbs. You do have to watch out for image formats though, and sometimes fiddle with size and number of colours.

I think Newt wants to major on actual classic book illustrations. For commissioning stuff you could go with various different styles, from Storn Cook's cartoony stuff to Stephanie Pui Mun Law's arty ethereal stuff.

Tim Gray
Silver Branch Games
www.silverbranch.co.uk

Ok a bit of an update here.

While clipart.com and a couple of other online resources have found me lots of little pieces and space fillers, I'm working with an artist to do the cover and some bigger internal B&W pieces.

The public domain works while invoking the classic feeling I was looking for were by their very nature a bit faded and needed touching up. Even in 300dpi they looked a bit tatty. So my artist is going to use them as a starting point, because its exactly what I want and it saves him a great deal of time composing the pieces which means that he'll be able to do more in the time available :)

Regards

;O)Newt
D101games -An Imaginary Company