Maybe the star rating got my hopes up, but I was disappointed by what I found inside. They say it's either quantity or quality and it's clear quantity was sought after here. To be blunt, I would not recommend this for anyone shopping around for professional quality illustrations. Prospective buyers should take a long hard look at the full size preview and know that this represents some of the higher quality pieces to be found within.

Firstly the art itself is VERY amateur, it seems to be a collection of high schooler level portfolios featuring a mix of crude photoshop drawings with shading so blurry it hurts the eyes, and pencil sketches in a mish-mash of styles and quality. Every page is a random assortment of genres and subjects with a random assortment of post production effects. The pencil sketches that have been blown up in size give away the reality that these are small doodles from a sketchbook rather than full size pieces, and the photoshop illustrations overly smooth and blurry shading displays the lack of experience in the artists behind them.

While the technical skill is obviously low, there are a handful of pieces which might actually qualify as useful, it's unfortunate then that these pieces are poorly collated with no attempt at organisation, or ease of use. There is no transparency meaning the aformentioned post production light flares, shadows, and fades various pieces have are there to stay and if you want to use them on anything but a white background you're out of luck. Some of the art is also mysteriously overlapped with a white glow effect from other pieces that leaves bits of them missing, and some are seemingly cropped from a larger piece, and the backgrounds provided are reminiscent of the early 90's straight-to-print boom (think early Vampire the Masquerade and third party d20 system products).

In spite of the above, this work clearly shows the up-and-coming work of a variety of artists, but if anything the document is premature. Some peices would make for a fine deviant art portfolio, but sadly help little as $20 pack of illustrations for fantasy RPG's. Given the royalty free artwork available across the internet, this document is simply not competitive with a free google search.

My recommendation would be to properly organise the book, remove the layer styles, show pieces at the correct resolution, and then - and only then - take $15 off the price tag and maybe it would be worth it for amateur writers looking for simple cheap illustrations.

This is a nice and generous collection of artwork. In particular, I appreciate the variety and creative choices used for the sketchs. I am looking forward to the ways in which I'll be able to incorporate this artwork with my rpg storylines in the future.

This is an excellent collection of artwork.

My only complaint is that it comes as a PDF and not as indivudal art files. But the artist offered to send me a zip file with the images in it, so that shows he is willing to go above and beyond for his customers - always an excellent thing.

This is arguably one of the best royalty free art deals you will ever find. Some of the pieces are cropped or modified versions of art from A Decade of Fantasy but there is still enough clip art for a wide variety of projects. Most of it is fantasy based but there are some good sci fi pieces and a few that could be used for modern products as well. I especially liked the variety of the art and the borders at the end of the package are a nice addition. Thank you Mr. Calkins for putting together this product!

Many of these images will be very useful. I generally prefer stock art sets with much more focused genres, media, and image quality, but the volume of art available here means that just about anyone can probably find 20+ images from this collection to use in your projects. For the price, I'd say the number of useful images for a "traditional fantasy" publisher makes this a pretty good, but not great, collection.

Cerberus Royalty Free Clip Art Pack is a 44 page collection of clip art images from artist Joe Calkins and Cerberus Illustrations. This product contains over 175 fantasy and science fiction clip art images of black-and-white art that are entirely royalty free and hence ready to use. This product contains a handful of images with nudity, and hence is only suitable for appropriate users.

The product comes as a large 60 MB download in pdf format that contains all the images of this product within a single file. A cover is provided that highlights the images contained in the product, but the remaining 43 pages of the product contain only the clip art images. No introductory text is provided, although the nature of the product is fairly self-explanatory. It would've been useful, though to get complete clarification on the 'royalty free' aspects, particularly regarding mofifying images, for example. Images within the product are all 300 dpi, and each page contains roughly 4 or 5 images, taking up about a quarter of a page in size per image. In addition to the clip art images, the product also contains 6 background or border pages reflecting the fantasy/science fiction theme.

Picking up such a large collection of images is generally like opening presents in Christmas day - you just don't know what you're going to get. Some of the art could be horrible and some could be fantastic, or the product could be something right out of your worst nightmares. I have to say that in this instance, the fantastic art on the product cover and previews does the product justice as it contains a great selection of artwork in a variety of different styles. Images range from the downright cartoony, to high quality shaded images that look fantastic. Others are just simple pencil drawings, but overall there's a great variety of interesting and even more importantly useful images in this product. DMs looking for good handouts or publishers looking for art can't go wrong with this product. Given that all the art in the product is from a single artist, despite the large variety of styles, the images can generate a sense of sameness. I don't think this matters much from a publisher's point of view though, or even for a DM looking for art as handouts.

The images themselves cover fantasy and science fiction, although the former gains vastly more coverage than the latter. In addition, by far the majority of the images are not scenery, but people, faces, and creatures with the odd symbol or scenic moment thrown in. The images aren't organised in any particular fashion, meaning that you're going to have to look for something you're after by scanning the entire product, but that gives you a general overview of the scope and quality of the product as well. I wasn't particularly fond of some of the styles, although I know this can be very subjective. Some of the art uses a style where shading looks very blurry, and the sharp lines or outlines of an object or creature are mixed into the blur of the image. This makes the entire image look a little out of focus. Overall, though, most of the work is of a very high quality.

Art in the industry can be expensive, so this product has created a good collection of royalty free artwork that can be used by players, DMs and publishers alike. I was impressed by the quality and quantity of the images, although there are some eye-sores in there (thankfully, few), but the organisation makes it a little more difficult to make the best of this product. For the price though (at ~12 cents per image), you get excellent value and even if you don't appreciate some of the art, there are still scores of other images to choose from. This is a handy, vivid collection of art that has great value and utility.

I have used some of this companies other stock art products and find them to be of very high quality, so when I saw this I immediately decided to purchase it. There are some Sci-Fi as well as fantasy images in this collection. The Sci-Fi will be less useful, but they are fairly generic and certainly do not detract. The most bang-for-your-buck will be in the fantasy images. A few are so simple as to be almost un-usable. Much like the clip-art you might find online. Now don't take that to mean I am dissing this product; I am not. I am saying that several of the 175 or so images were not terribly usable to me, nor do I think most publishers here on OBS will find much use for them. However, I could easily find places to use most of the other images. From some undead, to monsters and filler-icon images there is plenty to use here. I am very happy to have this quantity or quality stock art. Other bundles I have used have a few of useful images and most not. This product is the exact opposite!

Looking closer at the images all are B&W, some of sketch quality while others are more "finished" and fully rendered. A few show some photoshopping effects such as a Gaussian Blur. Again, only a few I would find no use for. (There is a very cartoon-like elf on page 8 I wouldn't use, but others might. But there are four other images on that page I CAN use! ) Each image is about 1/4 page, and each page contains five images as far as I can tell. What I did not find was any type of license agreement included. That may require some clarification; can I alter the image? Can I use it on a cover? Combine images? They may want to clarify these things by including a license with the images. The product description as of this review says this:

Over 175 300dpi black and white 100% royalty free fantasy and sci-fi clip art images by Joe Calkins. Most are roughly 1/4 page in size. The illustrations are in a variety of styles from sketches to line art to fully shaded pieces. Collection also includes six bonus page backgrounds. WARNING Some images contain nudity.

I found it quite accurate, and in no way felt the product was mis-represented. The Flash preview seems to be sized incorrectly so it's hard to see what your getting from that, but I saw enough that I was willing to risk the twenty bucks to have this. I give this product five stars for quality, value and quantity. (I have some slight reservations about the absence of a license agreement spelling out what I can and cannot do with the images, but I suspect that will be resolved shortly.)

The bottom line is that if you are a PDF publisher in need of cheap, quality generic art to round out your projects this art pack is worth every penny.