Pictures or "drawings" for characters

Jun 29, 2011

A few of the things that were created in my team recently contained dialogue where there were two characters that spoke back and forth. They were "real" still photos of the characters and the dialogue bubbles just moved back and forth during the dialogue.

Because we'll continue to have scenarios like this, we're debating whether it's more appealing to stick with still pictures or whether to look for something that's not a picture but instead character cartoon/drawing/etc. I think I've seen posts on here before about recommendations as to which is better, but don't recall what the answer was.

That said, regardless, does anyone have suggestions for great resources for faces, busts, whole bodies, etc?

Thanks!

Jessica

6 Replies

Kristen Hull

almost 12 years ago06/29/11 at 2:35 pm (UTC)

I haven't used all of these, but I like to bookmark sites when people make suggestions/recommendations for fun eLearning tools:

http://designcomics.org/characters.html

http://www.cartoonster.com/

http://www.openclipart.org/

http://www.iconspedia.com/cat/office/

Ron Price
Partner

almost 12 years ago06/29/11 at 2:50 pm (UTC)

Hello Jessica,

For real pictures - we mostly use Narratorfiles.com or elearningart.com - both have a variety of packages to choose from. These are not free, but the quality of these images (Narrator Files is higher quality) may be worth the investment. You can use PPT to crop to get the busts and face shots you want. To do the cropping and enlarging, you will want something with a decent resolution. You can also convert these to silhouettes if the pics are not quite the ethnicity you need - https://player.vimeo.com/video/149188842

For clip art or cartoons - there is a lot of free stuff available from Microsoft - you just have to look for it.

I also like - http://www.cartoonsolutions.com/store/catalog/PowerPoint-Pose-Packs-sp-99.html

We (our org) tend to use and prefer photos or silhouettes over clip art. But clip art may have a more global appeal since it is harder to distinguish nationalities and ethnicity in clip art.

Hope this helps

Robert Kennedy

almost 12 years ago06/29/11 at 3:20 pm (UTC)

HI Jessica,

As Ron said , you are probably going to have to do some cropping on whatever site you get. There are LOTS of sites out there both free and paid. In addition to the ones he mentioned, check out the elearningbrothers website as well. Check out iclipart.com. morguefile.com is a good free site. Microsoft's site has a load of stuff as well.

YOu have a lot to sort through already so I wont overwhelm you with any more sites . This is at LEAST a few hours worth of work :-).