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Where’s the best place to find cheap or free graphics?
I need some generic graphics to print onto vinyl for use on decorative glass and mirrors. I want things like spots, stars, flowers, leaves, stripes – basically interesting all-over patterns to form sections of the product (imagine a patchwork quilt, but with sections of printed vinyls instead of printed fabrics). I’m planning on drawing up some of the patterns myself, but I wondered if there is somewhere I can download patterns inexpensively (or free!) to use? Apologies if this is an obvious question, I’m not strictly in the signmaking industry although a lot of the techniques I use are the same.
Thanks!
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8 Replies
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Lots of stuff here, which is free, and can be manipulated in Illustrator or CorelDraw.
Just type in your search term, and see what comes up. -
Thanks Jamie, I’ll check out that link! 😀
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Hi Alison, what software do you use? In CorelDraw you get a disk of 1000’s of clipart images. You can buy a disc of clipart but beware some / most are rubbish.
Their are plenty of online image libraries e.g. http://www.123rf.com/ which you have to buy credits to use.
You can get a book of images and scan the ones you want, but copyright will be your problem with that.
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Hi David, I mainly use Adobe Photoshop, as my design work is hand-drawn and doesn’t require any machine cutting etc. Yes, it’s the copyright I was worried about – loads of lovely patterns and images online, but I’m going to be selling these products and I don’t want someone saying ‘Hey, that’s my design!’ and trying to sue me!!!
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well with istockphoto, most of these libraries have restrictions of selling on designs if sold in multiples. e.g. 100s T-shirt print and then sold online to randoms, the terms normally cover this.
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I often scan through this site for some basic vector downloads.
http://www.vectorportal.com/there are many others and links from this site but just try Free Vectors into google & you get far more than you can look at in a lifetime!!
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Thanks, there are lots of great images on the vector portal site.
Next question – I’ve downloaded a couple of the images but I don’t seem to have a programme on my computer that is able to open them. Photoshop doesn’t even recognise them in the folder where I saved them. I’m sure there must be something very simple that I’m doing wrong, but being a novice to this downloading lark, I’d be very grateful if someone could talk me through in simple steps how to get from clicking the download button on the website to opening up the file in Photoshop. Thanks!! 😎
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Photoshop isn’t a vector based design application.
Great for editing photos and creating pretty graphics, made up by millions of little pixels.
You need something like illustrator, signlab, corell draw.
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