Mainstream Imagery

There are a number of sites on the web with large libraries of clipart that anyone can access. While some require that you pay, others are free of charge.

The best I have found is the Art Today site, with forty thousand free images and 750 000 images in total (plus 2000 fonts)! When I joined it cost a little under $20 for a year; I understand that the price has gone up to almost $30 now, so its not cheap, but certainly not as expensive as other stuff on the web. Art Today maintains a library of tens of thousands of images (many in vector formats, which is an incredible bonus), and once you join you can download as many as you like and use them in your projects. While some of their stuff is cheesy, alot of it is right on and eminently suitable to radical publishing projects.

On the cheesy-but-free side of things, the following is a list of some of the free clipart sites I have visited:

• Ravenscroft offers free Celtic clipart
• Jewish clipart can be found at the Kristne Clip-Art illustrasjoner – Jødiske motiver site.
• Teachers Net has some good quality images available for download.
• Some nice animal-related clipart can be found at Stable Girl’s place.
• For Christian clipart (!) go to Timo’s Christian Clipart Site
• Business related clipart by Carolyn for free download
• A+ Art has loads of clipart and web graphics for free
• Some very nice artwork can be found at Digital Blasphemy
• Andy’s Art Attack
• Some vector images can be found at the Printshop Connection
• Some carton art in vector format by Jon Paul Berti
• Clip art connection and Barry’s free clip art are two of the largest online sources for free clipart
• www.fotosearch.com offers both royalty free and rights reserved photographs

The Mining Company maintains a page of links to free clipart sites. Softseek also maintains a similar page. Finally, Art Connex maintains a list of free clipart pages.

Duke University has a fantastic amount of their special collections and archives online. I was particularly happy to see that they have an advertisement database with over 7000 scanned ads printed in U.S. and Canadian newspapers and magazines between 1911 and 1955!

If you know of any sites that you feel I should mention in this list, email me. Due to the large amount of free clipart sites, though, I don’t guarantee that I will add every suggested site to this list.