Monstersandcritics.com
Mar 13
Flowers are undoubtedly designs popular with artists and craftspeople alike. Used in all forms of media from cards to paintings, fabrics to carvings; flowers have an instant appeal. Judy Balchin has taken the concept and created a source book of 100 designs which can combined or used on their own to make all kinds of projects. Both traditional and contemporary styles are included. Flowers range from roses, sweet peas, lilies to poppies and sunflowers. There are even smiling flowers suitable for children. Many are highly complex designs which would look stunning in embroidery. All the designs are printed in black making them ideal for tracing. You can also use the free CD Rom to print off images on your computer. A very useful book.
Myshelf.com
Oct 12
Here is the fourth book in Search Press new Design Library. If you are new to this idea then think of the bestselling Design Source Library series and add in a modern extra everything, a CD ROM is also enclosed in the book, both .jpeg and .tiff format. There are a hundred designs in here and this book is an ideal companion to Judy Balchins other book in this series Heart and Flower Designs (also reviewed on this site). As with all the books the first page contains a brief introduction to the topics and the rest of the book contains just the designs themselves. Each page has a line drawing or two and in this book you can find lots of individual blooms, borders, frames, corners, mandalas and motifs of various sizes. Many of them have an art nouveau style to them, while others are in the style of folk art, Ancient Egypt, India or the Orient to suit a wide variety of projects. Please remember they are not copyright free, but the small print at the back permits you to use up to fifteen of the drawings on a single project as long as you give a quote as to where they came from. It is easy to scale them up or down on the computer and not having to scan them in first certainly cuts down the time you have to spend on the preliminaries of your chosen project. I look forward to seeing the rest of the titles in this user friendly and modern series.
Papercraft Essentials
Issue 82
Featuring 100 expertly drawn original black and white line drawings, this book is full of ideas for crafters. Beautiful motifs, bouquets, single flowers, borders and frames adorn the pages, all designed to help create beautiful, innovative works of art such as quilts, stitched pieces, collages, journals, cards, pictures or paintings. From roses to daisies and delphiniums, the designs can be mixed and matched, adapted, scanned, enlarged, reduced or used at the same size.
