How to Remove a Background from Clipart

Removing a background means deleting the pixels around your artwork and saving what is left in a format that can store “nothing” — which in practice means a PNG with an alpha channel. If you skip that last part, you get a picture of your artwork on a white square, and it will look like a sticker every time you place it on a coloured page.

The three approaches, and when each one wins

1. Manual selection

In any editor with layers, select the background and delete it, then export as PNG. This gives you the most control and is worth the time for a single hero image with tricky edges — hair, fur, watercolour bleed, anything semi-transparent.

It is a bad use of an afternoon for twenty-seven pieces. Manual selection does not scale, and the quality gets worse as you get bored.

2. Automatic background removal

Automatic tools look for a dominant, relatively uniform background and remove it. They are excellent when your artwork already sits on a clean white or single-colour field, which is exactly what scanned or digitally painted clipart sheets usually look like.

They struggle when the background is busy, when the artwork itself is nearly the same colour as the background, or when there is a drop shadow you actually wanted to keep.

3. Draw on a transparent canvas in the first place

The least work is the work you never do. If you are drawing digitally, turn off the background layer before you export. Most people forget, which is why the other two approaches exist.

The edge problems that give you away

• White halo: a one-or-two-pixel light rim left behind where the background was anti-aliased into the artwork. It is invisible on white and obvious on navy.
• Hard jaggies: the opposite failure — the cut-out is so aggressive that the anti-aliasing is gone and every curve looks like a staircase.
• Punched-out holes: enclosed areas (the inside of a letter O, the gap in a handle) that should be transparent but were never selected.
• Lost softness: watercolour and gouache edges are partly transparent by nature. A cut-out that forces every pixel to fully opaque or fully gone destroys the thing that made the artwork look handmade.

Then save it correctly

1. 1Export as PNG, not JPEG. JPEG cannot store transparency at all, and it will silently flatten your background to white.
2. 2Keep the full resolution. You can always scale down; you cannot scale up.
3. 3Trim the empty space around the artwork so the file is the size of the art, not the size of the canvas it was drawn on.
4. 4Name the file something you will recognise in six months.