Free Photo Stock for your designs!!!

You might have noticed that I have not been posting here on my blog lately. Started the year off finding out that I am being laid off from the print shop I have been working for the last 35 years. Happy New Year and you are being laid off!!! The shop has merged with a larger printing company and everyone is being let go except the sales people. BUT, I am still as of this day working there as they have been of need of my skills. Eventually they will lay me off but they would like to hire me here and there for freelance work and I should be getting three months severance pay. Hurray!

So, I have been busy over on Linkedin writing articles and posting graphic design samples to show off some of my graphic design skills. I have been using Affinity Publisher which is a Adobe InDesign alternative, I highly recommend it. And I been using Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer, Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator alternatives. In my design samples, I have been using photos from a few great FREE stock sites I like to recommend.

First is Unsplash, I love this stock site. Browse to find a photo you want to use, double click the photo to open it up and click the free download button in the upper right corner. Also, I recommend checking out Pexels and Pixabay, both also are great free stock sites that you might find the images you need for your design projects. And you do not need to create an account to download the images.

Below are a couple of publications in which I use images I found on this sites and I posted to my Linkedin page.

#photostock #graphicdesign #affinitypublisher

Painting for the Holidays Pt.2

One more for this year's holidays. Found this photo on Pixabay and thought it would be nice art piece. I took the photo into Corel Painter and created the painting there before taking it into Affinity Photo to create the final piece by adding a old paper texture and the text.

#holidays #corelpainter #affinityphoto #Pixabay #photoart

FINAL ARTWORK

Original photo from Pixabay

Painting the Holidays 2019

Sorry that I have not been posting on the blog much. This time of year is busy at the print shop with all the holiday programs, cards and so on. Plus, on top of that, I have been under the weather. Winter and cold weather is not my favorite time of the year.

So, something different again! Since I have not been out taking any holiday photos, I decided to do something outside my comfort zone. This time I took a photo from the free stock website Pixabay and use Corel Painter to convert the photo into a painting. I started in Affinity Photo with a new document and then went under View > Studio > Stock. There you can access free stock sites like Pixabay, Unsplash and Pexels. Think of it as Adobe Stock without the need for an Adobe account or having to pay for the images as these sites are free stock sites. Once I found a photo and dropped it into Affinity Photo, I then simply saved the photo and then opened it into Corel Painter. In Painter, I played around with multiply brushes and even though Painter has an Auto-paint feature, this time I did it all myself. As for the text, after exporting a jpg file out of Painter, I placed it into Affinity Photo and added the text there.

So there you go! And Happy Holidays to everyone!

#corelpainter #affinityphoto #Pixabay #happyholidays

Final painting from Corel Painter

Original photo from Pixabay