If I had a dollar for every time my mother bemoans the fact that I didn’t go on to be a great clip artist! What’s started out as a niche art form has taken a life of its own; today, clip art is used very prominently in personal and commercial projects. Clip art can be found in things ranging from home-printed greeting cards to commercial candles.

Never forgetting the medium; clip art comes in many forms, either electronic or print. Most clip art today is created, distributed, and used in an electronic form. Since its inception, clip art has evolved to include a wide variety of content, file formats, illustration styles, and licensing restrictions. Clip art is generally composed exclusively of illustrations (created by hand or by computer software), and does not include stock photography.

There are many types of clip art available online including free clip art of random animated images depicting whatever the clip artist wants. There are also a whole host of holiday clip art including holidays like Easter, Valentine’s Day, 4th of July, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Chanukah, and the New Year.

If you’re getting married and want to create your own invitations using clip art, there are a whole host of images available for you to celebrate your special day with your friends and family.

Microsoft also has many of its products, images, logos, and insignias available as clip art if you’re considering putting together a technology montage of clip art.

Also, if you’re religious and you’re trying to get out the congregation, you can create clip art using religious images that will not only inspire but depict whatever images you’d like to for the memo you’re sending out.

Clip art came from the practice of physically cutting images from pre existing works to use in subsequent projects. Beginning with the advent of computers in publishing, “paste up” became the preeminent method of using clip art. However, since the early 1990’s, clip art has existed via desktop publishing. The mass production and assimilation of personal computers into our everyday lives made clip art through desktop applications possible.

As we snip and clip our way into the 21st century, clip art has made something of a retro resurgence; it’s chic to use clip art again; what’s old is new. So long as we’ve got an artistic bone in our bodies, we’ll find ways to make new things out of everything that’s old; cutting and pasting through this digital era into a new world tomorrow.