Dance Clip Art

Dance clip art is an easy and fun way to spice up any website, poster, or brochure about your favorite form of movement. There are a few guidelines to follow when picking out the right dance clip art to suit your purpose, but if those are kept in mind, it's as easy as "a-five-six-seven-eight!"

Remember that just because something is "art" doesn't mean that it's necessarily good art. This applies to dance clip art as much as anything, so it's a good idea to take the time to make sure of some things before you slap an image on your web page:

1. Does It Suit Your Message? If you have a fantastically great image of a tango dancer, it's not really going to help you illustrate your country line dance fan site. Subtle differences also can be significant – if you want to teach a class for elderly singles and you illustrate it with a young couple doing ballroom, it's not going to be as appealing. Pick an image that really suits your purpose.
2. Take The Time to Find Quality. Thankfully, with the plethora of images available, it's easy to get the exactly right image to suit your message. However, quality means more than just looking good. Image Resolution is a factor – you want at least 150 dpi (dots-per-inch) for clip art that's going to be printed, and 300 dpi if it's going to be color. If it's going to be on a website, the opposite is true – screen resolution is only 72 dpi, and any image that's a higher resolution than that will make your entire website load more slowly.
3. Use Images Legally. Like any artist, people who create clip art would like to be reimbursed for their work. Licenses are how they do that – sometimes as part of a large clip art collection, sometimes through individual sites (listed below). Either way, you can't just go surfing on the web, find a dance image, and copy it to your website. Whether or not the artist can afford lawyers to track you down, it's simply unethical – so take the time to make sure you have permission to use the image on your site.

Here are some examples of where to find good quality clip art. Some is free clip art, some costs a small amount of money, and some you have probably already paid for.

• Microsoft Word or Other Word Processing Programs – You may not realize it, but when you paid for that license for your word processing application you most likely also paid for a built-in library of clip art. Whether or not it is appropriate for your site (see number one above) can vary, but most high-quality applications not only have stored libraries but also online "supplemental" image libraries. These images are free, vary in resolution, size, and style, and probably already exist on your computer.
• Stock Image Galleries – There are many professional stock image sources on the web, which for a small fee (as low as a dollar an image) will give you access to thousands of high-quality professional images and photos. Using images from iStockPhoto is as easy as a click and a download.
• Creative Commons – The Creative Commons license was created as a way to give artists and photographers better control of how their work is distributed. Many different variations of the license exist. They even link into sites like Flickr for their pool of images. Depending on whether or not your site is commercial, personal, or some other variant, you can probably find an image and license to match. One advantage to this is that CC makes it very easy to get in touch with the artist personally, and they may have artwork to suit your site.

While it is certainly easy enough to just google "dance clip art" and start clicking on sites filled with pictures of dancers, that is probably the least efficient way to find images. There is an entire industry built around putting low-quality clip art on sites with page after page of ads that you have to click through in order to find anything even remotely good. Try these sources first, and save your time for dancing!

• Photos of Ballet Dancers
• Dance Studio Equipment
• Pictures of Limbo Dancing

• Dance Steps to Thriller
• Popular Line Dances
• Famous Choreographers
• Country Line Dance Steps
• Famous Ballet Dancers

• Category:Other Dance Topics
• Free Dance Party Clip Art
• Swing Dance Clip Art
• Fifties Dance Clip Art
• Ballroom Dance Clip Art