Valentines Day Ideas: Free Clip Art For Kids Crafts and Cards

1/28/10 - By Marcy

Earlier this week we posted about some very high tech ways to make cool Valentines Day Cards, On the other end of the spectrum, this post shares how you can use your computer to find pretty, free, vintage Valentines Day clip art that you and you kid can use to make beautiful home made Valentines Day Cards with nothing more than red or pink construction paper, a paper doily, a glue stick.

Did you know that you can get free clip art in your inbox every week?

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We LOVE the weekly Dover free clipart we get via email. Every major holiday (Valentines Day included) they always send links to beautiful vintage holiday images that we use for inspiration, coloring, cut-outs and all kinds of creative activities.

Whether your gang wants to make beautiful cards, decorate gift boxes (a good way to recycle old ones!), or even try a bit of decoupage, we hope this guide will encourage some heart-felt inspiration for a fabulous Valentine's Day. Add a bit of glitter or sparkle and you’ll put that Whitman’s Sampler box to shame!

Check out these great resources for free online clip art sources:

DOVER: Offers a few different sets of art you can sign up to receive by email:

Free Clipart

Free Design Samples

Free Samples including Poems And More

Children’s Book (And Game) Samples

More places to get Valentines day clip art (The images that follow are both Free and Royalty-Free for personal, non-commercial, use):

Vintage Holiday Crafts
If you go to this site any time before February 14th you’ll see adorable valentines below which are even more links to handy dandy heart-day imagery. It’s well worth exploring the site further for other vintage imagery.

Hearts to Hearts
Nifty keen collection featuring 82 retro valentines from the 1950’s and 1960’s. (The Flintstones’ cards really…“rock!”)

Lace Paper Valentines
A breathtakingly beautiful collection of 14 antique cards using lace paper (the fancy Victorian version of the doily) and romantic imagery. For inspiration as well as actual clipping.

Vintage Valentines: Clipart and Postcards from Long Ago:

These lovely links from About.com’s antiques collection will lead you to vintage valentine victory; it’s as easy as ONE (46 incredible images), TWO (13 cool cards), THREE! (ten tales of true love in images). Tip: with postcards you can “unthink” the original image and use your favorite parts (even multiple times) to make patterns or new designs.

Kristina’s Random Images
Awesome collection. Most of what’s here is not holiday-specific but would work for Valentines in a…heartbeat.

Art-E-Zine
A huge resource for some antique photos and other unique old images to down load. The pictures of children from long ago HERE and HERE would look super keen on Valentines Day cards or artfully collaged on a hand-made chocolate box (just right click to save to your desktop).

Graphics Fairy
Lovely site run by an eagle-eyed lass named Karen; you’ll find angels, animals, and just about everything else—over 1000 images with a combined total of 23 under Valentines. Scroll down and look right (easy to miss) to see the categories listed. My favorite? Paper Dolls featuring card-perfect vintage Kewpies!

Antique Clip Art
Plenty of charming antique graphics in sizes up to 3.5” square. Skip invite to download larger graphics for a fee—the fab freebies’ll do. Old fashioned doggies and kitties here are sweet-not-saccharine kid pleasers.

Retro Graphics
Don’t let the somewhat awkward interface fool you, there’s lots of fun black & white images here but you have to know to click on the small images to see the full-size ones after you locate them in the index. Not many valentines but you’ll hit a valentine-friendly home run under “children”.

The Vintage Moth
Not a huge archive but an especially nice and unusual selection of free antique and vintage images curated with eclectic enthusiasm by one Abigale Mooney.

Karen’s Whimsy
Another fun site with everything from “Water World” characters (oooh, mermaids!) to antique Paper Dolls (with patterns you can use to make your own) . Not obvious, but selection categories are at left. Under angels go to cherubs category for some doosies!

For more Valentine's Day ideas, check out some earlier Mommy Poppins posts about making a wearable vintage Valentine for baby and using the New York Public Library’s catalog of old Valentine postcards for inspiration.

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A FEW TIPS: We’ve found the following totally optional and fairly inexpensive craft supplies are really great for this project:

1. a fancy craft scissors (Fiskars Paper Edgers are great) or pinking shears
2. small paper doilies—plain, red, foil, or even heart-shaped; Wilton’s 3.5” hearts are perfect
3. silver or gold metallic ink (Windsor Newton’s) or a fine-tip silver or gold metallic pen
4. Mod Podge, matte finish (if you’re making decoupage)