Huge collection of free nature & science images & poster tutorial

The Biodiversity Heritage Library provide free access to their recourses, including thousands of scanned copies of books which are no longer under copyright. I've collected a few of my favourite images from the site below. As always, double check the links to make sure that the images are still copyright free when you come to use them in your projects. Scroll down to see how I used one of them to mock up a simple poster design.

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Poster Tutorial

Open a new A4 document in Photoshop and paste in a copy of the fox image.

Hit M to select the Marquee tool and draw a rectangle around the brown edge. Hit delete to remove it.

 Right click on the Marquee tool and select Eliptical Marquee. Type 10 in the Feather box, this will create a soft, feathered edge to the shape.

Draw an ellipse around the fox and press CTRL C and CTRL V to copy paste it. Toggle the eye on the original fox layer to hide it for now.

Hit I to select the Eyedropper tool, click somewhere on the sandy part of the image to select that colour (try to pick the bit that seems to form the majority of the background colour).

Select the background layer and press Shift F5 to open the fill tool. Select foreground colour and press ok.

Create a new layer behind the fox layer and press B to select the Brush tool. Using a watercolour brush (you can download some for free here) we can start to extend the painting. Use the Eyedropper tool to select the appropriate colours.

Work your way around the edge of the fox image, adding splashes of watercolour where you feel appropriate. Experiment with the different brushes and layering the colours until you are happy with the effect.

Click on the fox image layer and select the clone stamp tool. Holding down the Alt key, click on part of the creamy background colour, next to the Fox 1/3 wording near the bottom. A bullseye will appear.

Hold down the left mouse button and drag the circle over the wording. Keep clicking and dragging until the wording has disappeared. You can find a tutorial on using the clone stamp here.

Type in the details for your poster. I used fonts AdornsS Condensed and Hummingbird.

Tada!

Useful Websites For Designers

I've gathered together a list of the websites I find most useful when designing.

Design Cuts

You can access some of the best creative resources here at heavily discounted prices (often up to 99% off). They offer really useful bundles of vectors, fonts, backgrounds, textures etc which include a commercial licence (see their terms for details).

I’ve purchased half a dozen of their bundles over the years and use them all frequently in my work.

They also regularly give out lovely freebies (check out their delightful watercolour freebie here) and they have pages of easy to follow tutorials. I really can’t praise this site highly enough.

Spoon Graphics

Chris Spooner’s blog is a great resource for designers. He regularly posts some of the best tutorials I’ve seen for Photoshop and Illustrator as well as numerous freebies. You also get a big bundle of free resources if you sign up to the newsletter.  I love this video tutorial for creating a blueprint effect in Photoshop 

The site also offers a premium membership for $10 per month, which gives you access to thousands of additional resources including actions, brushes and vectors.

A commercial licence is usually included with all the resources but do check the terms to be certain of the specifics. As with Design Cuts, this is a site I go back to time and time again.

Pinterest

Pinterest has many uses but what I love most are the multitudes of tutorials they have all gathered in one place (for graphic design, crafts, DIY, cooking, cosplay, makeup effects - if you can think of it, you can probably find it on Pinterest). I also obsessively hoard collect colour palettes on there, so I can quickly find great colour schemes for any projects I’m working on. You can find this palette here.

Creative Bloq

A huge site filled with tips, inspiration and tutorials. I love their curated list of the best free fonts available for designers, saving you the effort of trawling through font download sites. You can find it here. 

Hongkiat

Lots of tutorials, freebies and design tips can be found here. Not everything you find on there will be available for commercial use, so check the terms carefully. There's a great list of Illustrator tutorials to try out which you can find here.

Free Design Resources

High quality design resources that are totally free for commercial use. Their freebies include fonts, mockups, graphics and templates.

I hope you find some of the websites as useful as I have!

Copyright Free Images For Commercial Use

I used to really struggle to find good quality free images that allow use without restriction in commercial projects. To save you a similar struggle, I’ve gathered together a list of the best sites I’ve found.

As with all “free” image sites, it’s always best to double check the licence/terms of use for any images before putting them in projects you plan to sell/use publicly – just in case!

Unsplash

They have a collection of stunning high resolution photos, to do with as you please. There are some really lovely photos on here, including lots of nature shots and this rather handsome chap.

Pixabay

A huge amount of images which are free for any commercial use without restriction. The site includes photos, vectors and illustrations.

The Graphics Fairy

This is a great site for old photos and images of all kinds; often taken from public domain books and similar sources.

There are a couple of reasonable restrictions, such as only using a maximum of 6 images in any one project and not giving away the images for free. Although they do allow you to sell the images as long as you stick to the rule of 6. Check the site’s terms  of use for more information.

They also have a big list of tutorials and craft projects using images taken from the site.

MMT

All photos are totally free for commercial use. They are particularly good for beautiful nature and macro shots.

Magdeleine

They add one new high resolution photo each day. This site has an excellent search function where you can look for photos containing a specific dominant colour. There are separate search buttons for public domain and/or attribution required images.

Happy picture hunting!