I'm back with another photography/art resource freebie post! Yay! Last post, we talked about Gimp 2 and how it was an effective program to replace Photoshop with. It may seem daunting at first, but once you get the hang of it, you'll be popping out creative works in no time! Most of you veterans know about all these already, but it can't hurt to get the word spread!
Today, we'll talk about some resources that offer free, little cost or simply ask for a credit when using their work. You can find 'elements' (bits of things that you take from a picture for your main work I.e the moon in my deathly fairy composite) for your composites, or new backgrounds, or possibly even textures! Let's get started!
I want to talk about getting free stock photos! We all know shutterstock is a great resource for stock photos, they're very large and have a great variety. However, if you're just playing around, just learning, etc, you don't want to pay for a membership or keep paying for the rights to use them.
First up we have pixabay. https://pixabay.com/ It's a great website, that has a lot of variety! It's where I got my graveyard background!
Next is stocksnap.io https://stocksnap.io/view-photos/sort/date/desc, another great resource!
Then, there's unsplash. https://unsplash.com/
Lastly, we can't forget about the art community that's been around FOREVER, Deviantart! Now, some of these stock photos you may have to pay for, or they ask for credit. You'll have to read the artist's TOS before using these! https://www.deviantart.com/?q=stock
Looking for something to add a little bit of pizzaz to your work? Maybe you'd like to have some lightning brushes or butterfly brushes? Photoshop brushes work in Gimp 2! To install your photoshop brushes, you'll need to go to your Gimp 2 directory and find your brush file. You dump in the files and voila! You're done! Then you can just load up Gimp 2 and get to work! Here are some websites to get free brushes, or again, for little cost or for credit.
https://www.deviantart.com/?section=&global=1&q=photoshop+brushes Deviantart remains one of the best places for free/cheap resources!
https://www.brusheezy.com/ Either wants credit, or for you to buy a license for their work.
Onto fonts! I only have one website I use often for fonts, simply because they have so many. These are great for collages, designing cards, etc. http://www.1001fonts.com/ To install fonts, you find your fonts folder in your windows directory and dump all the files in! Gimp 2 (and most other text programs) will pull the fonts from this folder.
Another website I like for cheap/free resources is https://ashedesign.com/. They have a $5 Friday, and right now they have two gems for free!
That's all I have for now! If I find more resources, of course I'll post them for everyone's convenience. Thanks for reading, and I appreciate comments, upvotes and resteems! Below I'll include a couple of forum signatures that I've made for a couple of my characters from Guild Wars 2 using fonts, free stock photos and brushes!
