Many times I have been asked questions regarding clip art and its use for your Church Library. In this column, I hope to introduce you to the exciting world of clip art, and demonstrate how easily you can create wonderful documents from your own home computer.
Clip art refers to images used to create interesting publications with your computer. The phrase “clip art”, originated from the practice of finding an image in a document, such as a book or magazine, clipping it out with scissors and pasting in the document you were creating. With widespread use and acceptance of the photocopier, this type of graphic became almost a requirement for producing professionally presentable publications. Today, word processing programs such as Microsoft Word are now sophisticated enough to allow the insertion and layering of graphic images and offer a wide variety of interesting clip art images on the Microsoft.com website. (The Microsoft Design Gallery ~ http://dgl.microsoft.com/)
Desktop publishing has become a ‘home based’ activity largely because professional quality graphic images and the software necessary to create slick looking documents is less expensive and more user friendly than ever before. Software such as PrintShop and PrintMaster are quite inexpensive, and will walk you through projects such as creating greeting cards, newsletters, and brochures. Most people have their favourite programs to work with, and I am no exception. I work frequently with Microsoft Publisher because it comes bundled (often free) with the purchase of Microsoft Office Suite package- a package I have available through work. Publisher has pre-built and sample templates and a step-by-step wizard to help you create great looking documents from your home computer.
Hundreds of clip art images are included with the Microsoft Office Suite package and even if you only have Microsoft Word, there are lots of clip art files available for you to insert into your word processing document. Using MSWord software, choose “Insert” in the top toolbar, and then select the “Picture” option. This allows you to choose between clip art (already loaded in the software), or if you prefer, you can add your own picture file (choose “From File”). Once you select the clip art option, a new window will open allowing you to identify which particular theme, or topic you want, such as “church”, or “Christmas”. Entering your search word (for our example, we will use “church”) and clicking on the search button will bring up a selection of images that are related to the word you searched for. In our example, at least 40 images appear in a scrolling window, and by clicking on whichever image you like, Word will place that picture on your document where your cursor was located. Often when you first place the image on your page, it’s too large, so be aware that you can resize the image so that it better fits where you want it to go. Click on the picture and a series of squares and lines will surround the image. Select the bottom right corner square by placing your cursor overtop of it, and a diagonal arrow should appear, allowing you to click your mouse button (HOLD it down) and drag the square toward the top left corner of the image. The size of your image will be determined by where you let go of the mouse button. This method can be used for making the clip art image both smaller and larger.
You can do many things with clip art images, in fact, similar to text, it is possible to center it on the line, put fancy borders around it, or make text appear in front of it, behind it, or wrap around it, as in our example here. Many software packages offer excellent tutorials on how to accomplish some of these fancy placement tricks, and there are always third party books (such as the “for dummies” series) on how to work with common software packages.
Stay tuned for the next installment of The Computer Corner, where we’ll discuss where to find free clip art on the web.
