Clipart 101: Where to Look for Your Clip Art

Recently I stumbled across a cool thing called Clip Art. It's basically little graphic images that you can add to your presentations, e-mails, blogs, or websites (or just print it out), it tends to be smaller and often can be customized in a program like Paint or Photoshop (I use paint - it's what came with my computer!). There are lots of different sites that you can get free clip-art from, and some sites where you have to pay. Here are two of my favorite sites to find clip-art:

1. Cute Colors - This website offers both free clip-art and clip-art you have to pay for. If you're using the free clip-art on your website or blog, you do have to link back to the site - but they have some really cool designs! I've found tons of clip-art that I like and a few banners and backgrounds also. To save to clipart to your computer all I do is highlight it and then right click and click Save As and save it to the folder of my choice. You can check out the website for more information on downloading and editing your clip-art.

2. Original Country Clipart - I initially discovered "clip-art" here, and think Lisa (the owner of the site) has some great stuff! This is also a "pay" site but there's also a lot of free clip-art and designs. Just scroll down the left hand side and click on Freebie Menu. Once again, you should link back to Country Clipart when posting them on your website or blog, and be sure to check with their policies.

Those are all of the clip-art sites I've found so far, and I've downloaded a few graphics I like. To make it easier (and more organized) I keep all my clip-art in their own file in my "My Pictures" file. After I download them I go into Paint (you can find it by clicking on the Start - All Programs - Accessories and scroll down and click paint), and go up to file and click "Open" then I open the one I just downloaded and see how it looks. I then re-name the file by clicking "Save As" and save it as the title that I want it to be saved as.

Clipart is another wonderful great thing available to us on the Internet, and just like with everything else be careful what you download (anything could contain a virus) and always give credit to the place from which you downloaded it from! Happy clip-arting!