Turn Clip Art into a Paint Color Sheet

Students love to use Paint.  Sometimes I have the perfect color sheet to go with a lesson, but it doesn't translate well as a color sheet in Paint.  Depending on the image, the colors don't fill in the space completely when you use the fill tool.

You can fix this and turn any clip art image into a Paint color sheet.

1.  Paste your image into Paint.  (You can put it in Word first and recolor it to be outline only.)
2.  Save your image as a monochromatic bitmap.

3.  Open the monochromatic bitmap image.  You will notice you have no colors!

4.  Save the image AGAIN as a PNG file.

5.  Use your fill bucket and color!  Just make sure to open the PNG file in Paint and you can do what you want to it, no weird white spaces.

My favorite way to use this lesson is when I teach an internet safety lesson to Kindergarten.  I've created a color sheet that goes with a book I read, Little Red Hoodie.  Fortunately, Little Red Hoodie has a karate chopping Granny who is a little more internet savvy than she is, and Little Red ends up just fine.    We read the book, discuss, then color our sheet in Paint.