Cute Desert Animals Clipart with Cactus and Dune Scenery

Desert animals clipart in a cartoon style: 24 animals and six bits of scenery, 30 designs in all, each drawn on its own with a transparent background. The animals have dark brown outlines, large shiny eyes and smiling faces, colored in sand, tan, rust and sage green.

The animals

Fourteen species are here, and ten of them get two different poses:

• Dromedary camel, standing and lying down
• Fennec fox, mid-step and sitting with its tail wrapped around its feet
• Meerkat, standing upright and keeping lookout on a rock
• Greater roadrunner, crest raised, then running flat out
• Rattlesnake, head up with its tongue out, and curled up asleep
• Black-tailed jackrabbit, sitting and in a full leap
• Desert collared lizard, walking and curled up with its tail looped beside it
• Desert tortoise, standing and walking
• Coyote, sitting and howling
• Burrowing owl, standing and with its wings spread

The sand fox, scorpion, yellow mongoose and vulture appear once each. The cast mixes animals of the American Southwest, like the roadrunner, coyote and desert tortoise, with ones from African and Middle Eastern deserts, like the camel, fennec fox and meerkat. That makes it a general desert theme rather than a picture of one real place, which matters if you are matching a lesson on a specific desert.

Scenery pieces

The other six designs are a saguaro with a pink flower, a prickly pear clump with a small round cactus at its base, an agave rosette, a low sand dune, a stack of red rocks and a sunset circle with dunes and a little cactus inside. They are separate files, so you can put the sunset at the back, a dune in front and an animal on top. The mountains and sky in the composition preview are not part of the set. Only these six pieces are.

Which file for which job

• Printing or laying out a page: use the color PNG. Each one is a 3600 px square, which is 12 inches at 300 dpi, but the drawing inside it measures about 10 to 11 inches on its longest side. Printing larger than that will start to look soft.
• Changing colors or editing shapes: open the color SVG or EPS in vector software. Each design uses six to ten flat colors as separate filled areas, with no fonts or embedded pictures.
• Cutting: use the silhouette files. They are one black shape with the face and inner lines removed. The guide suggests starting at about 5 inches on the longest side and doing a small test cut first, since the scorpion’s legs and the birds’ toes are thin. The files have not been tested on a cutting machine.

DXF files hold outlines only, set in inches on a 12-inch canvas, so use SVG or EPS when you want the colors.

A few silhouettes lose their character once the detail is gone. The sleeping rattlesnake turns into a rounded mound with a rattle on top, and the rocks and the sunset become plain domes. They still work as background shapes, but the standing animals read far better in solid black.