Swing Dance Clip Art

With swing dance becoming more and more popular, there's a plethora of sites using swing dance clip art to decorate and illustrate their pages. However, just like the dance itself, just because it's swing doesn't mean it's good. Here's some guidelines for getting the best swing dance clip art for your site.

The fact is, it's easy to find free clip art online – even with a swing dance theme. At first glance, these pages seem to have all sorts of great illustrations of dance – partners in closed dance position, swing dance, waltz, foxtrot, country western dancing. They show a variety of styles of art as well, from photographs to line drawings to stylized icons (such as the one that resembles the figures on men's and women's restrooms, but in a dancing pose).

However, if you look at the size of the images, they are all rather small. They are designed for a time when people used modems to connect to the Internet, when images had to be very, very tiny or it took forever for them to load. Today's Internet is different; rather than relying on simple dance diagrams, we have the ability to learn from entire videos and websites of dancing on the web. Clip art images like this no longer really work on the web – and the answer is not to just make them bigger. In fact, the bigger they get, the worse they look. The most that these kinds of images would be good for on the modern Internet is to use as icons for chat sites and the like.

With a small bit of cash, though, you can acquire swing dance images that are absolutely big enough and of a high enough quality that they can be used in all sorts of places. Fotosearch, for example, yields all kinds of images, from romantic silhouettes dancing by moonlight to wild couples contorting their bodies in extreme swing motion.

If photos are more what you're looking for, then all you have to do is head over to iStockPhoto.com and sign up for a free account. Perfectly good images are available for as low as a dollar, and best of all, you don't have to worry about whether you have the rights to use them. No one wants to steal artwork, and by purchasing these images you also secure the full rights to use the images.

Of course, it's possible that you already own swing dance images of your own – check in your word processor. Microsoft Word not only supplies its program with clip art, but also has an active website with updated images put up for easy download and integration into your application. You can even cut it from the word processor and use it in other image editing programs such as Photoshop.

Speaking of those kinds of programs, you can also simply take pictures of yourself or your friends swing dancing and use graphics programs to "tweak" them until they look almost as stylized as the kinds of things you find on the pay-for-clip-art-sites. Best of all, this method ensures that you always have exactly the kind of clip art you need.

Whatever source you use to get your clip art, try to remember what it is you like about swing dance in the first place. The image needs to convey the excitement of the music, the dynamic bounce of the dresses, the strong arms of the leader, and the stretching and leaping legs of the follower. Most of all, it needs to convey the connection between the dancers, that electric energy that draws people to swing dancing all over the world.

• 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

• Main Page
• Ballroom Dance Clip Art
• Fifties Dance Clip Art
• Category:Other Dance Topics
• Line Dancing Instructions