There is a lot of clipart available on the internet and there are numerous books of clipart you can purchase. My favorite place to purchase clipart on line is at Amazon.com. Their prices are very reasonable, their shipping/handling is inexpensive and they usually ship Priority Mail for no extra charge. My favorite clipart books are by Dover Publications. They even have what they call "Electronic Clip Art". These are books of clipart with all the clipart scanned on a CD that comes with the book. This is great for people who don't have a scanner. These clip art books are $7.96 at Amazon.com. The books in this series are Art Nouveau Frames and Borders, Celtic Designs, Floral Illustrations, North American Indian Motifs, Decorative Letters, Calligraphic Ornaments, Christmas Designs, and Food and Drink Illustrations. Another really good source for clipart is Art Today. For $29.00 a year, you have access to every kind of clipart you can imagine, in addition to photographs and fonts.

This tutorial will teach you how you can effectively clean up clip art and/or recolor, for use on your web page. It will also teach you a few techniques for creating effects with clipart. A very good hint that will save you headaches later, always work on a copy of your original clipart!

First, a few thoughts on scanning clipart. When you scan clipart, scan it at a larger percentage (if your scanner allows this). As an example, I scanned the lava lamp at 300%, then resampled to the size I wanted. The reason for this is that you will frequently get jagged edges in a scan and resampling the image down will smooth out the jaggies. Following is another technique for cleaning up the jaggies if resampling doesn't work:

Getting Rid of the Jaggies

1. Open your black and white graphic (in this case the puzzle graphic).
2. If the graphic is a gif, up the colors to 16 million.
3. Apply a Gaussian Blur of 2 to graphic.
4. Choose Colors|Adjust|Highlight Midtone and Shadow.
5. Click on Auto Proof so you can see your results.
6. Set to Highlight 80, Midtone 0, and Shadow 70.
7. Click on OK.
8. Click on Image|Sharpen|Sharpen More (you may need to do this more than once).

These are just general guidelines. Sometimes a Gaussian blur of 1 with the sharpen filter applied does the trick. This method also works well when you have a piece of clip art that is too thin. The larger the Gaussian blur, the thicker the lines become.

To test your skill at making thin clip art images thicker, click here to download the graphic I used for the sidebar graphic on this page. I am including instructions here to show you an artifact of this method of fixing clipart and how to get rid of it.

1. Open the callig.jpg.
2. Don't resize. In this case, it is better to resize later.
3. Apply a Gaussian blur of 2.
4. Choose Colors|Adjust|Highlight Midtone and Shadow.
5. Click on Auto Proof so you can see your results.
6. Set to Highlight 90, Midtone 0, and Shadow 80.
7. Click on Image|Sharpen|Sharpen More.
8. Now, you will probably see a blurry image around the outside of the graphic (use the zoom tool).
9. To get rid of this, click on any black part of the image. Choose Selections|Modify|Select Similar. You will now have all the black selected. Expand your selecton by 2 (Selections|Modify|Expand). Invert your selection and flood fill with white (or hit delete if white is your background color).

Creating a Puzzle

Now that we have this great black and white puzzle graphic, how about making a puzzle. Open any photograph you would like or click here to download the graphic I used. This graphic was part of an exercise you can participate in called Weekend Theme (WET). You can find out about this on alt.binaries.comp-graphics. An image is posted once a week and people have a ball creating different images and posting them to the group. Try it, its a lot of fun and gets the creative juices going!

To create a puzzle using the black and white puzzle graphic:

1. Open the image you want to make into a puzzle.
2. Open the black and white puzzle graphic.
3. Rotate puzzle graphic if necessary (I rotated 90 degrees to the right).
4. Resize the puzzle graphic to be close to the size of the graphic you want to make into a puzzle. Take either the length or width and enter that amount in the resize box and make sure that "Maintain Aspect Ratio" is checked. Since my graphic was 500x385, I entered "500" in the width and let the program set the height.
5. Switch back to your original image and add a new layer.
6. On the new layer, choose Masks|New|From Image and choose the puzzle.jpg as the image. Make sure "Source Luminance" is checked and check "Invert Mask Data".
7. Choose Masks|Save to Alpha Channel (you should see the image of the puzzle pop up, this is good).
8. Click on OK and name the Channel "puzzle".
9. Choose Masks|Delete and say "no" when asked to merge with layer.
10. Load your puzzle selection from the Alpha Channel (Selections|Load from Alpha Channel).
11. Apply the cutout filter (Image|Effects|Cutout) as follows:
    
    • Color: Black
    • Opacity: 100%
    • Blur: 6-8
    • Offset: 2,2
12. If you see some stray black pixels (I did), invert your selection and hit delete).
13. If you inverted your selection, invert back again.
14. Add another new layer and apply a drop shadow as follows:
    
    • Color: White
    • Opacity: 100%
    • Blur: 1
    • Offset: 1,1
15. Adjust the opacity on the cutout and shadow layers until your graphic looks good to you.
16. If you want to cut out a piece of the graphic, make a copy to work on (Shift-D).
17. Merge all layers (Layers|Merge All (Flatten)).
18. Add a new layer and flood fill with white.
19. Load your puzzle selection and flood fill with black.
20. Click on the puzzle piece you want to remove with the magic wand.
21. Feather your selection by 1 (Selections|Modify|Feather).
22. Throw away your white layer (click on the layer and drag to the trash can).
23. Cut your puzzle piece (Ctrl-X) and paste it "as a new layer".
24. Move the puzzle piece where you want it on the image (you might even want to rotate it).
25. Save your graphic as a jpg.

Colorizing Clipart

The first thing you need to do to colorize clip art is to make selections of various parts of the clipart for fills and make a mask of the outline of the clipart so you can fill the background. I colorized the lava lamp by:

1. Open the black and white graphic.
2. Make a copy (Shift D) and put away your original)
3. Select the parts of the lamp you want to colorize. The second picture above shows the "water" area of the lamp selected. Save the selection to an alpha channel. I selected the "water" area, the "bubbles" and the inset area in the base of the lamp and saved them as selections. Since I wanted the outline of the lamp to be black, I didn't make a selection.
4. Choose Masks|New|From Image. Choose Masks|Delete and merge with the layer.
5. Add a new layer and drag it under your graphic and call it "fill". Fill with a background color or texture. You should now have your black and white graphic with the background showing through.
6. Load a selection, feather the selection by 1 and fill with the color you want. You may need to fill a couple of times to get it to look good.
7. Repeat with remaining selections.

Logo from Clip Art

1. I opened the World graphic and added a white right border large enough to add the text.
2. Created a mask from the graphic (Masks|New|From Image, Luminance checked and "Invert" checked.
3. Saved the mask to Alpha channel (Masks|Save to Alpha Channel).
4. Added a new layer and flood filled with background color.
5. Added another new layer and loaded the selection (Selections|Load from Alpha Channel).
6. Flood filled the selection with a darker color. I then beveled with Eye Candy's Inner Bevel set to 2.
7. Added another new layer. On this new layer I added a drop shadow, with 100% opacity, then I adjusted the opacity slider until the shadow looked they way I wanted it to look.
8. I then added another layer and on this layer I added the text, again with a slight bevel. Save your text to an Alpha channel so that you can change the text later if you want.
9. I added a final layer for the text shadow.
10. I saved the graphic as a PSP document, then flattened the layers and saved as a jpg.

Clipart to Neon

I love flamingos and when I saw this clipart image, I thought it would look great as a neon image. To create this effect: Make a copy of your original clip art. Work on the copy. Follow steps outlined above to save the flamingo mask/selection. Flood fill the bottom layer with black. Add a new layer. Load the Selection from the alpha channel (Selections|Load from Alpha Channel. Feather your selection by 10. Fill several times with a bright neon type color. Add another new layer. Load selection again (don't feather) and fill with black.