Many designers find the idea of using clip art in their work to be somewhat gauche. While that may be true of using a lot of clip art in its raw state, you shouldn't overlook it as a potential design resource. Clip art can be a great basis for speeding up the production of custom graphics. To create our illustration in Figure A, we used a clip art butterfly as the basis for creating a butterfly template that then served as the foundation for all three butterflies in the image.

Figure A: All three of these unique butterfly designs originated from the same base clip art.

Taking Clip Art to New Places
Using stock clip art as a template enabled us to create several custom graphics in far less time than it would have taken to draw them out separately. In this article, we'll show you how we modified a clip art butterfly into a serviceable template and then modified the template to create unique graphics. First, we'll explain how to evaluate your clip art and decide whether using it as a template is going to save or waste your time. Then, we'll dissect our design into manageable chunks using layers. Next, we'll modify our template by using the path tools and filters such as Outline Stroke. Finally, we'll use the Free Transform tool to tweak our butterfly to the perfect shape and give you other tips for modifying your templates.

Taking Stock
Illustrator doesn't come with a lot of stock clip art resources like CorelDRAW, but it does come with Brush Libraries that have a wide variety of different graphics in them. So, don't forget to check your Illustrator CD if you're looking for some additional clip art to manipulate.

To create our butterfly template, we started out with the butterfly symbol that comes in Illustrator's Animal Sample Library. To load it, choose Window > Brush Libraries > Animal Sample to open the library. Then, click and drag the butterfly icon onto the document. With the butterfly selected, choose Object > Transform > Scale to open the Scale dialog box. In the Uniform text box, enter 400, and then click OK. This step makes it easier to work with the smaller details of our design.

Once you enlarge the butterfly, you can see from Figure B that it isn't exactly the prettiest butterfly ever. It's actually kind of strange looking. However, looks aren't everything and what really matters is how it's constructed. When you first look at any piece of clip art, you need to analyze how it's put together and compare that to what you want to do with it. Some graphics may be put together in such a way that modifying them may actually take longer than drawing it from scratch yourself. Also, if your goal is to create a scientifically accurate representation of the Monarch butterfly, then modifying a clip art butterfly isn't the way to go about it-starting from scratch would serve you far better.

Figure B: Analyze the structure of the clip art to see if it will really help you. Since this design is broken up into distinct parts, it works well for customization.