We’ve all had a project where clip art saved the day! A situation where either time or money didn’t allow the creation of an original piece of art to illustrate our story and we turned to that solid source of solutions: Clip Art.
Today, this option also comes, of course, on disks, as digital stock art. One can find huge collections of borders, illustrations and backgrounds, even stock photos, on various digital media for our unlimited use in publications.
To Clip or Not to Clip
The first challenge when using clip art is to not become lazy. Selecting stock images should go beyond just filling empty space. As an example, it is tempting, while doing any publication during the first two weeks of December, to place an image of Santa Claus in any given empty space when we run out of story material. This is probably the most acceptable time of the year to use clip art casually. After all, it is Christmas and choosing a story-related drawing is less important when everyone is in the holiday mood.
You get the point. Make your choice of a graphic as relevant as possible to your article. It should appear to the reader as if you did create original art!
Now Featuring
The second challenge in clip art selection is not mixing artistic styles.
It should appear that the same artist worked on the whole story.
In other words, it could be OK in a given newsletter to have various graphic styles sprinkled throughout the publication. But it is not a good idea to do this within a single article.
If you are doing a story on recycling and you have some terrific clip art from various sources, consider the art as a family or group of work, as if one person developed it. You may have several professional ink line drawings depicting clean air and water, and also have some bold symbolic drawings illustrating industrial waste. It may be difficult to mix these contrasting styles in the same article and have it look right.
This, of course requires editorial discretion and the answer is an individual choice. This advice here is meant to serve as a guide or criteria when you are dealing with this same situation. Make your artwork look as uniform as possible. There are certain exceptions of course. Sometimes the title illustration, or cover of a booklet, is special. It can be different from the internal drawings. Sometimes an established logo, like the recycling symbol, must be used as is in contrast to cartoons or pencil drawings. In other words, give your clip art images the same consideration you have given the article’s content.
More from Less
And finally, you may want to edit your clip art. This is the third challenge. Up until now you did not require special software or editing skills to add art to your project. Once you have decided to make alterations to stock graphics you’ve involved many new considerations.
Time is first. Altering a drawing may take as long as creating one. This may defeat your original purpose.
Money is second. If you don’t already own the appropriate software you will have to buy it. And graphic software programs come in two basic categories. You will need both.
Clip art, indeed all computer art, comes in either bitmapped (pixels) format or in vector (instructions) format. You will need to understand these differences and in which format you are working. Color is a whole other issue.
This brief presentation is focused on vector format images only. These are also known as PostScript images, or EPS (Encapsulated PostScript).
As the editing possibilities of clip art images are endless, herein we will use simple stock icons for the sake of illustration.
Along the left edge of this column you will see three simple tree leaf silhouette icons. These are the original clip art images.
As EPS drawings they can, of course, be made any size and placed in any position on the page. Text can be made to wrap around them as you see. So far, so good.
At the beginning of this article we used the center image, a maple leaf, to create a graphically-enhanced drop cap. To do this I opened the program called Adobe Illustrator, then opened the clip art image. I changed the object’s fill from black to 10% gray and saved the file with a new name, being sure to add the EPS header required by this layout program. Without this header a simple gray square would appear on the screen in the layout. It would print OK but I wouldn’t be able to “see” what I was getting. Adjusting the layout would be guesswork.
For this project I created the capital “W” still in Illustrator. Many page layout programs create dropcaps automatically, but I wanted complete freedom in positioning the initial over the leaf shadow, so I created it as a separate element. In Illustrator, I typed the letter and set it at a large size.
I converted it to “outlines” making it a piece of computer art rather than a typed character. I then saved this file for later use.
In this layout program I “placed” these two drawings, individually, behind the text and positioned them. This created the new use for the original “black silhouette” art and added a new texture or “tone” to my story.
The larger maple leaf on the page 26 is another example of enhancement to the same original drawing. I have added a shadow creating a sense of depth to a simple image. For this effect I used Adobe Photoshop. This program allowed me to convert the original outline into a high resolution bitmap (300 dots per inch), split the drawing into separate layers, or channels, and build a softer version, the shadow, beneath the original. Here you see the result.
I should say that space here does not permit a complete tutorial on exact software techniques. I am unable to share with you each step involved as a computer lesson, if you will. But you can see how some simple steps can create newer and more exciting results, making your articles and projects more professional and exciting to read.
Current versions of software offer incredible options in creating and editing images. And there is no end to options and upgrades to come. The idea is to acquire a knack for quick and simple adjustments to existing images. Any original drawing, and often the simpler the better, can be expanded upon to make a more dynamic illustration. This adds variety and impact to your presentation. And you can’t inform and educate if people aren’t attracted to your finished piece.
To complete this simple presentation I have taken two more, essentially simple icons from our clip art library and enhanced them using available software.
The black and white shapes in the rabbit icon were adjusted to gray tones in Illustrator. A rectangle border was added. This finished drawing was opened into PhotoShop and an embossed filter was applied along with texture. Some areas were softened and hand-painted highlights were put in. This file was saved, in gray scale, as a 300 dpi TIFF file.
The hikers, above, were isolated from the original hiking trail sign and opened into a three dimensional drawing program. The flat shapes were extruded and color was applied. This file was saved as a vector-type EPS file.
Hopefully, this will inspire you to use your clip art more creatively and help you to not be limited to using it simply as it comes. Make something of it!
