Whiptips – a crafts advice column for readers to ask questions or offer advice by leaving comments. View the Whiptips archive here. You can submit questions, to whiptips@gmail.com. Please include photos with your questions!
Winnie writes in asking for a picture to use in a collage. Can anyone help out with her specific enquiry? or with suggestions for sites with pictures that are out of copyright with high-res images suitable for download and printing? For a start there are quite a few childrens printable colouring in sites that could also be useful for this purpose or online libraries with old books and archived prints. Any more ideas?
I am making a collage for my front door and am trying to find the outline of a crow. Have searched as many internet sites as possible but still haven’t found one and I don’t draw crows very well. (you don’t want to see!)
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Take a look at this flickr gruop for images that you can use for art
http://www.flickr.com/groups/collageimages/
I think there is some debate about whether or not they are copyrighted or not.
In this flickr group you can request certain images. See
http://www.flickr.com/groups/collageimages/discuss/72057594131820587/
Wikimedia Commons is a great place to find copyright free images. Most are available in a high-resolution format too: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
Also, Flickr has a Creative Commons area that allows you to see and use images marked by people as open to re-use. Be sure to check the specifics of the license, but it’s a great resource. http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons
Many images just require you to attribute the image to the person who created it.
For free photos, I use http://www.sxc.hu/. Most photos are from amatures and it is completely free to use (if a photo has rights, it will be extremely clear).
Also, the New York Public Library has an amazing digital collection, not just for photos. All are free and for public use. http://lcweb2.loc.gov/pp/pphome.html
For great photo reference, I use http://www.veer.com. They are a photo-stock agency that has mostly royalty-free pic, just in case you need to purchase something.
before i had a digital camera i used veer.com for simply posting pictures on my blog. my friend was using certain pics, tracing them and using them for freezer paper stenciled t-shirts. when asked we’d always tell or share the veer.com site, props! and all, never had a any copyright issues though. good luck.
This is a flickr group that I like; members post images that are ok for group members to use in their art and collages.
This isn’t really an online resource, but a publishing company called Dover has reasonably priced books full of copyright free images on a number of subjects – they tend to be images of the old-fashioned engraving sort, which I think is nice. I have found many of these books at my local library, and some of the later editions include a CD rom with all the images contained in the book. Hope you find what you’re looking for!
There is a flickr group just for posting images to use in collage. There are some fabulous things in the group!
http://www.flickr.com/groups/collageimages/
Scary bird images can be found at:
http://www.marthastewart.com/page.jhtml?type=content&id=channel184543&site=
I think this might contain the crow image you’re looking for.
A couple of years ago I bought a two set disc on ebay of 800 images which were old vintage photos of people, animals and birds – for $8 US. If you search there, I am sure you will find what you need – cheaply and of course they were all high resolution COPYRIGHT FREE images which like Dover Press could be blown up into huge sizes or left small. Great for collages!
You could also try Clipart.com — commercial site, so you have to pay, but once you’ve kicked in for a week, month, whatever, you can download as many images as you want. Lots of cheesy MSOffice type stuff but also some good historical images, too. Good search function, too.
try istockphoto. they have amazing images for only a $1. they might not have the exact image (illustration) you’re looking for but they are a great resource for the future.
http://www.istockphoto.com/
http://www.fromoldbooks.org/ is a treasure-trove.
More as a general copyright-free pics source,
though there are (unoutlined) crows at: http://www.fromoldbooks.org/Rackham-SomeBritishBallads/pages/042-The-Twa-Corbies/
I made a post using some other pics from there recently – http://spaciouscraft.typepad.com/truly_spacious/2006/09/foresight.html
Crows galore at http://community.livejournal.com/corvidlove/
And my crow-icon at livejournal (http://eloquicrow.livejournal.com/) is a pic I took, which you are welcome to use for a personal project – please just let me know if you do, and show me a pic of what you create.
Finally – there is the wondrous (unchecked for crows): http://www.enchantedlearning.com/Home.html
xxx
The library? Just borrow a book on birds, and copy a page or two of crow pictures from there!? Just an idea, the internet is not the world! Good luck!