How to Turn a Clipart Sheet Into Individual PNG Files

You have one image with twenty pieces of art on it. Here is how to get twenty separate transparent PNGs — by hand, and automatically.

September 16, 2026

Learn Clipart

Clip It & Zip It

A clipart sheet — sometimes called an asset board — is one image holding many separate drawings. It is a great way to draw a coordinated set, and a terrible way to use one. To put a single flower on an invitation you need that flower as its own file.

Doing it by hand

Open the sheet in an editor that supports transparency.
Remove the background so the gaps between pieces are actually empty, not white.
Select one piece, copy it, and paste it into a new document sized to that piece.
Trim the transparent margin, then export as PNG.
Repeat. Twenty-seven times.

This works, and for four or five pieces it is genuinely the fastest option. The pain is linear: every extra piece is another full cycle, and the last few are always sloppier than the first few.

Doing it automatically

Once the background is transparent, a computer can find the pieces for you. Each drawing is an “island” of connected non-transparent pixels surrounded by nothing. Software walks the image, groups the connected pixels, and cuts a tightly cropped PNG around each group.

That is the whole trick, and it is why background removal has to happen first. On a white background there are no islands — there is one big rectangle.

The hard case: pieces that touch

Automatic separation splits things that are visually separate. If two flowers overlap, or a stem crosses a ribbon, the computer sees one island and gives you one file containing both.

There is no universally correct answer here, because whether two touching shapes are one piece or two is a design decision. The practical fix is to leave real gaps between pieces when you draw the sheet — a few percent of the piece width is plenty — and to review anything that comes back merged rather than assuming it is right.

What good output looks like

One PNG per piece, each cropped tight to its own artwork.
Transparent backgrounds with the original soft edges intact.
Full resolution — the same pixels that were on the sheet, not a resized copy.
Predictable file names, so the set stays in order.
All of it in one ZIP, because thirty separate downloads is its own kind of misery.