Free stockpile illustrations - anybody know of a site?

Hi,

I recently set up shop selling kids stickers. This is going well, so I'm also getting into selling party supplies.

One of the things I'm selling is personalised party invitations. I'm a cr@p drawer, so I'd like to know where I can find a stockpile of public domain illustrations which I can download for free. Does anybody know of such a website? I've found a few that charge a fee or have licenses so I wouldn't be able to use them for my purpose.

(My understanding of "public domain" means free with no copyright or licenses, to use however I like. If I'm mistaken here I might also need correcting lol)

Depends on what you're looking for -- when you say "illustrations" I'm thinking something along the lines of the complexity of an average cartoon character. It's hard to find public domain illustrations like that, but you can get them for free -- just find some you like on DeviantArt or another open art forum, and contact the illustrator and ask for permission. Some will ignore you, some will say no, some will ask for a royalty, and some won't care as long as their name can appear on the finished product (which on a birthday invitation is certainly easy, since most have copyright info on the back.)

What I mean is, sources for that are generally abundant, but require some digging. Sources for available photography are much easier to find, since photographers usually are pretty specific in their licencing requirements.

You can check on Flickr using this search string:



Where "keyword" is obviously replaced with your keyword (for more than one word, use a plus sign to separate them. That search will show only photos that match your keyword, plus have been licenced under CC with explicit permission by the artist for the picture to be modified and resold without royalty. Unfortunately that only applies to photographs.

You could also just pay someone to create the images for you. I realise that you said "free," but line artists are cheaper than you might think; plus, a one-time expense for a given image can be paid for many times over in sales if the card ends up being popular.


Frank

Thanks Frank. Yeah you're right its cartoon type drawings I'm after. I thought there might be some digging required ;). Thanks for the tips

If you're chasing cartoon type fonts as well, www.blambot.com is a good resource.

Link hidden: Login to view is also a good resource for user-contributed public domain work. It is almost entirely photos, unfortunately, but could be a place to dig up a few resources.

You could always take a photograph and "cartoonise" it using PhotoShop or other applications that do that kind of thing.


Frank