If you aren’t using art in your gym’s print and online materials, your materials may not be nearly as appealing visually as they should be. Or perhaps they are. Perhaps you’re fortunate enough to have graphic design skills, or someone on your staff does, so you have the resources to create original, impactful graphics. 

For everyone else, clip art can be the last, extra ingredient that gives your gymnastic studio’s content some extra pop. Even better, you can find a wide range of free clip art, including specifically gymnastics clip art.

What is clip art?

Clipart, as it’s used today, are simple, typically stylized graphic images that can be easily inserted into other materials, from a document to a website. That means you can use them to add a visual element into everything from orientation packages to promotional postcards. You can also insert them into your studio’s social media content.

One reason why clip art is so flexible is because their shape isn’t fixed into hard corners like stock photos, which are set as rectangles or squares. That means you can slip clip art into tight spots in your gym’s materials. You do want to keep an eye of the file format of the clip art you choose so you’ve got maximum flexibility. Clipart that’s in a JPEG file can’t be resized to be larger without altering the quality and integrity of the image. If you find a JPEG (or JPG) clip art in a size that works where you want to use it – great. However, clip art that’s in a vector file format (look for the .eps, .tif, or .svg file extension) can be resized without degrading image quality and clarity.

Show me that sweet, sweet free clip art!

Before we dig into the list of free gymnastics clip art resources, the last point to remember is to check the license on the free clip art you use. There’s plenty of free clip art available that can be used for commercial purposes, as you’ll be doing when you use it in your gym’s materials. That license may still come with conditions, such as how to attribute the clip art or how exactly it’s being used as part of a commercial enterprise. Here’s a little primer on using clipart products, say mugs or t-shirts, that a business sells.

Here’s a list of sites that have free clip art specifically related to gymnastics:

• GoGraph has a broad range of free clip art, including an extensive gymnastics section. The styles of the clip art vary, from cartoon character images that young kids will like to more elegant and artistic images that older gymnasts would appreciate.

• ClipArtPanda also has a broad range of clip art options, including some that present quite life-like looking gymnasts, as well as providing an array of diverse young gymnasts, including boys, and African-American kids.

• Classroom Clip Art provides multiple images of boys and girls in different gymnastics poses and on various equipment. Its images also span a wide range of ages, instead of sticking to silhouettes or cartoon-y kids.

• Vecteezy offers a mix of both .jpg and vector clip art files, and even most of the vector files can be downloaded for free. Many of their vector images that are marked as “premium” (that indicates you need to pay a license fee to use), can be downloaded for free under different licensing terms. The site spells out the different license terms, which generally regard providing attribution on free images.

• clipart.me may not have the most extensive, overall selection of gymnastics clip art. It does have a good range of gymnastics equipment clip art. 123RF is another site with a nice collection of equipment clip art, as well as strength and stretching clip art.

These last three options may not have gymnastics clip art, but they are good libraries of free clip art that you might find useful:

• This is a list of clip art resources geared toward teachers, so you might find some good teaching and coaching related options here.

• Here’s another master list of free clip art resources, including clip art in the public domain, which means you can use it for any purpose, even on items you sell (you should still check any specific image you want to use on a product you sell with your lawyer).

• pdclipart.org is the ultimate list of other clip art resources in the public domain. This master list breaks down its separate lists by topic to help you navigate quickly to relevant options.

Don’t fall down the clip art rabbit hole

There’s actually a plethora of options. Once you get started, you can lose hours sorting through the sites, thinking an even better series of free gymnastics clip art is just around the corner. You don’t want to fall down that rabbit hole. Before you start looking, revisit your branding guide and establish some criteria of what you’re looking for in clip art. That will focus your selection process. The other way to shorten your selection process – task someone else with creating a short list of options for you.

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