BACKTRACK: Zen Garden

Back when I was in college, which every year that passes seems to exponentially increase the amount of time it seems that that was, my professor said that any secretary can use a single piece of clip art on a document to spice it up. I paraphrase, and my apologies to secretaries who do this. The idea is, however, that clip art as single use item is something that anyone can do and it will look better than without any clip art at all.

Some of you may have gathered by now, I love clip art. When first I heard this statement, way back when, I was slightly offended and taken aback. After all I was guilty of dropping a piece of good clip art on a piece of paper and being happy with it. Since that day, I have rarely done that. And for a long time I wondered what was the purpose of clip art if you weren't supposed to just use it one piece at a time.

There did come a time however that I needed something special that was not by itself in the clip art library at my disposal. I needed to combine more than one piece and with a little tweaking and bending and pulling I worked a few pieces of clip art together to make a good little illustration. And then the gates of clip art heaven (no connection to any actual company or website) opened up and I saw the light. The errors of my ways were shown to me and my transgressions erased . . . or something to that effect.

The beauty of clipart I've come to realize over the years is that it IS good for single use one shot deals if you need it in a pinch. It DOES liven up a page of text and help illustrate a point, if and only if you use the appropriate piece of clip art. And I have seen some blatantly ignorant uses of a piece of clip art. But the real beauty of a piece of clip art is that you are given pieces of a puzzle with which to build whatever. You become the McGuyver of art, Gilligan's Professor of Picasso, the ancient Chinese Tangram Master with triangles. The clipart works best if combined in an intelligent fashion with a purpose, think collage.

Sometime back I assigned the exercise of creating a clipart garden. Which was to say, use readily available sources such as clipart, magazine photographs, or pre-constructed 3D structures to create a garden. I, of course, chose clip art. Since Corel is my software of choice (semi blatant plug) and it comes with a CD full of clip art I had my source. I skimmed through the few areas where I could find plants and thought about how I could combine the images therein.

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