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The truth is that times are tough for everybody these days. Security of the home and family matters really should be a primary concern for anybody, especially for people who have children. With something as simple as baby footprint clipart, security can even be provided for the children. Additionally, family fun and entertainment can be had by families working together to create custom clip art using the baby’s footprint as the basis for that clipart work. When you are done, you will have truly unique, custom-made and totally free clip art – one that you’ll be proud of and admired by others.

Creating a Handy Rainbow Flower Clip Art
Some of the most popular forms of clipart created with these family imprint images are flowers. If you have created say some ‘handy’ clipart images already, then with six or seven cropped and reduced copies of a handprint placed in the shape of a circle, the graphic now becomes a clip art of a flower. If you had changed the color of each of those petal handprints, you would then have a rainbow flower clip art. Alternately, you can use a simple program like Paint in Windows. Just select the spray tin and paint a graffiti-like a hand, foot, smily face, match-stick man or anything.

Using Graphics and Clip Art for Learning Steps
Small, printed copies of the baby’s footprint can also be used throughout the home in order to create virtual foot paths for the baby to follow. Different colored footprints may lead to different areas of the home. These are not only helpful to the child but can also be an invaluable tool for teaching and education as well. Color differentiation, directions, left and right and many other things that the child must learn to comprehend can all be taught using the baby’s very own feet to guide the child along the way. At an older age, or perhaps for a sibling, it could be the guiding of a treasure trail. Later at your children’s party, they could form part of the fun - for different guests or teams at a children’s treasure hunt party.

If you want to add even more pizzazz to your efforts, try creating extra features with the addition of animal clip art or other such add-ons to your clipart works. The ‘Footprints in the Sand’ is a very popular work within the world of fine arts and has also become popular in its niche of clip art. This “masterpiece” can be recreated using the baby’s actual footprints in the finished artwork.

Mastering Simple Skills
When the subject is considered objectively, the artwork, the security, the teaching tools and many other factors combine to make creating your own baby’s footprint clipart to be something that you should not only consider, but actively pursue. Once you’ve learnt the few tricks involved, it’s a skill you can apply to a variety of future events be they business or at home – your grown up children’s shower party invites, christening invitations – and soon it’ll be for grandchildren’s parties!

We all love our pets. We enjoy them as puppies, watch them mature, and sadly, when they take leave of us at the end, we wish we had taken just one more photo of their puppy months or exuberant adolescent moments - some more videos, photos - even had a portrait painted by a local artist. One of the ways to creatively capture your pet’s memory for years to come is to make an impression of its paw. After all it was/is something you have seen often enough - too much on rainy days! - a sign you’ve come to recognize. It could be 2D on paper or 3D as an impression or cast.
Then you should always somehow get a record (a photo or through scanning) onto your computer. Such prints, images or graphics can so easily be incorporated into photo albums, scrap books and even hung on your wall, depending on how they are made. It’s also a great form of backup, should something happen to the original.

Ideas abound when one asks a young person how they would make a paw print of their dog, with the most common reply being: “First you got to doink it on its head so it stays still…”

Areas and Issues to Note and Beware
This very briefly summarizes points to remember when taking your pet paw impression:
- They do not understand what we are trying to do; so
- They may become frightened or unsure when we try and do something to them that they do not understand, and as a result:
- They wriggle! And maybe:
- They will whine or bark – even bite a little harder than their usual friendly chewing!
The solution is to find ways to take an impression while allowing your pet to do what comes naturally.

Some ideas that my children came up with:
- Dig a hole. Make some mud in it. Lay a long piece of paper on the other side of the hole, and stand at the far end of it from the dog. Someone holds the dog at the mud-hole end, and the other person crinkles a crisp packet, encouraging the dog to run through the mud, and across the paper, creating paw prints as they go! I could see that working on our dogs, actually - they’ll do almost anything for a crisp.
- Use powder paint and make a mix. Rub, tickle and stroke the dog’s tummy until its paws stick up in the air. Roll paint on its paw and quickly press a piece of paper against it. Yes, that would work - until the dog gets up and runs through the house…So be prepared for every possible eventuality!

The children do have the right idea though - if we can get the dog to act in a natural way, like walking through wet cement, or across some wet plaster of Paris, or in some sand and then take either a plaster of Paris or a latex impression - we are on a winning streak.

Other ideas that came up: scan your dog’s paw and print it off, photograph it while it’s on its back, make an impression using Pleistocene, Blue Tack, White Tack or salt dough. Take a rubbing (like a brass rubbing) of a paw imprint in some damp concrete.

Try and find new ways to immortalize your pet, and have fun while doing it.

Just as the world seems permanently in a rush, so are we to get this up - even in its present slightly slim version. We will endeavor to match and align the blog looks (skin/theme, whatever) to our site theme in the near future, but am very content with the present looks, so maybe that can wait!

So, what have we got in store for you?

I’ll soon be publishing some novel styles of graphic, useable for any topic, but I’ll be showing them in the inimitable baby footprint genre graphic.

Also planned is an article on poems (re: newly borns - say no more!) to go and incorporate with any sort of invitation or occasion one might so wish.

But first something on Creating Animal Paw Prints and Impressions