Free stuff for when you don't have a budget: DIY clip art

Clip art is the worst! It's generic and cheesy. It's not cohesive -- start using it and next thing you know you've got ten images in ten different (cheesy) styles.

I won't go on. If you want to read a longer and more articulate rant against clipart, see Interpretation by Design: Why Clip Art is Evil.

But what's a museum kid to do? Your supervisor want a snappy poster for next month's family program! You don't have a budget! Clip art is free...colorful...tempting. I'll admit, I've done it.

As suggested in the aforementioned Interpretation by Design posting, making your own can be a great alternative. It takes a little more time -- second only to budgets in things you probably don't have...but it's fun, reusable, and in my possibly irrational opinion, totally worth it!

Ok, I'm a pretty terrible artist, but here's how I got my hands on some free, cohesive, non-generic, and pretty cute -- if I may say so -- images for a recent programming publication. Maybe this is obvious...but it took my a while to get it right:

1. Find some pictures of whatever you want on Google Image Search.
2. Print them out.
3. Draw over the important part of the image with a black Sharpie.
4. Put a blank piece of paper on top and trace your underlying Sharpie lines in pencil. 
5. Make any alterations and adjustments to your pencil-image.
6. Retrace over the pencil lines in Sharpie.
7. Put ony more blank piece of paper on top and trace your underlying Sharpie lines in Sharpie -- this creates a clean, pencil-free copy.
8. Find a coworker who has a scanner, and scan your clean, 3rd-generation Sharpie images from step 7.
9. Use 'em! (You can use a really basic free photo editor like MS Office Picture Manager or even...Word...to clean them up. With black and white line images I'd recommend upping the contrast as much as possible and setting the white background as the transparent color before you drop them into your publication.)

Results -- not exactly the work of a professional artiste, but a great alternative for interesting, professional-looking, kid/family-oriented publications: