10 Easy Ways to Modify Clip Art

Not really a way to modify clip art, selecting the right image format is essential to being able to flip, resize, rotate, stretch, crop, colorize, or combine images. If you don't know the difference between bitmap and vector images, then you may have difficulty putting these image modifications to proper use. For example, GIF may be a prevalent clip art format but it's not a good photo format and not great for printing either.

An otherwise perfect piece of clip art that is simply facing the wrong direction may need nothing more than a flip - reversing its direction. This is easy to do in any graphics software program.

Images seldom come in just the right size to fit everyone's needs. However, resizing clip art isn't difficult if you follow a few guidelines.

When flipping isn't enough, rotate clip art to the right orientation for your layout. Vector images are the easiest to rotate without distortion.

While resizing maintains the original dimensions of a piece of clip art, stretching and skewing changes its appearance in just certain directions. Create special effects with stretch, skew, and distort tools.

There's no rule that says you have to use the entire piece of clip art. Crop out parts you don't want or don't need. Cropping can help to focus on important parts of the image, simplify it, or change the meaning. Take the clip art apart and use bits and pieces of the image.

Sometimes colorizing a piece of clip art is better than using one that is already in color. You can add just the right colors in the right places to suit your purposes.

Sometimes color isn't an option but the best piece of clip art is in color. Converting an image to a grayscale bitmap renders the colors in shades of gray and increases the usefulness of any clip art collection.

Crisp black and white clip art is ideal for publications that are likely to be photocopied or need to be printed on less than 600 dpi printers. Any publication that isn't produced in color will need either grayscale or B&W images. There are several ways, depending on the software, for converting a piece of clip art from color to black and white.

If two pieces of clip art aren't quite right, maybe putting them together will work. Create a new image by combining several pieces of clip art or delete some portions of each and combine the remaining elements.