81.5 Trillion Free Vectors, Brushes, Stock Photographs, Fonts and Jellybeans!

I previously warned against both tutorials and digital art communities, and because I really enjoy telling you what to do, I’m going to warn you again.

When I was planning the creation of Superluminal, I had thought that I would use it partly to promote quality free digital art resources, and had even created at least one post on this topic. However, while doing more research, I soon realized that this whole internet thing is totally inundated with sites offering free resources of all types, and the idea of being a part of that started to worry me a bit. Besides the fact that I want this blog to be different, I don’t want you to drown in the flood of free resources on the internets. Trust me on this one, I’m Dutch, we know about floods.

And drowning is generally not considered a good thing.

It’s all about the awareness

The main reason I promote the “just make everything yourself” attitude is because I truly think it is the best approach to get the most out of your creativity, and to really make something that comes from you. This not always being practical, free resources are a good (and free!) alternative. The other one is collaboration, but I’ll get into that another day. Free resources make it a lot easier, for us beginners in particular, to really get to work on some of that digital art we keep hearing about. But there are things you need to keep in mind when you decide to use free resources of any kind in your work.

You will learn the arts of implementation and assimilation, not creation

This can be useful if all you are doing is design-related or commercial work, and you’re on a deadline, and are otherwise not interested in digitally expressing your creativity. But if that’s all you’re doing or want to do, then this is not the blog for you anyway. Even if you are not an amateur, I’m sure you are aware that no matter how talented you may be, no matter how much recognition you get for your work, you are on an eternal quest of learning. Having parts of your artworks be made by other people, unless a conscious and deliberate choice, means you are missing out on quality learning you know you need no matter how advanced your skills might be. You are never done. Don’t hold yourself back just because it’s easier.

Are you ready to lose control?

All these free resources are not made especially for you. They are made for the masses, sometimes out of the kindness of the creator’s heart, sometimes out of a desperate need for attention and recognition (which I can totally relate to) and other times as free advertising for whatever they might be trying to sell you. They don’t put it online so you specifically can integrate it into whatever you might be working on at the time. This means that these resources are not specifically tailored to you. In fact, a lot of these websites offering free resources are big. Very big. They get tons of visitors because we humans are whores for freebies. You can be sure to know that you are not the only one using those vectors or textures or sound effects. There goes your uniqueness, right out of the window. Notice how you hear the same ‘creaky metal door’ and ‘car crashing’ sound effects in countless movies, tv shows and games? Also notice how lame that is? It’s almost as if all these companies that have budgets ranging from tens of thousands to tens of millions still get their sound effects from one cd that they pass around amongst each other. That really sucks, and you know it’ll be worse if it’s free.

Get time on your side

So, if you want to use something that has been downloaded seven hundred million times by others, you will at least have to change and adapt it to fit into your project. This will take time. If you do it right, it will take a lot of time. Time you could’ve spent learning how to draw that figure yourself, or at least trace it from a picture that has the right perspective, rather than trying to use the warp tool to somehow bend that leg at the right angle. It may seem hard to believe, but investing a little more time into making it yourself, even if you are using some tricks to make it easier, will often create results that are not nearly as half assed as trying to somehow fit that free image into your work. Besides that, all these freebies aren’t the focal point of your work anyway. And don’t you dare try to make that freebie the focal point of the work because you find it easier to just adapt everything else around it. You might as well give up if you do that.

Numbers don’t mean anything when they’re out of context

This is something that irks me, and it relates to the title of my post that you surely felt intrinsically attracted to. This is about the way that free resources are presented, on blogs in particular, with post titles like:

• 75 Free Fonts
• 100 Essential Free Patterns
• 56+5 Totally Free Grunge Brushes You Can’t Do Without
• 16,2342 Free Textures You Will Definitely Need Or Else You Will Die Like Those Guys In The Klopeks’ Furnace

You get the picture.

Numbered lists are a blog favorite, they bring in the traffic, I’ve done my research. But those numbers can be blinding. Do you really need that many grunge brushes? Do you even need anything listed in any of those posts? A lot of times, the freebies can be of high quality, sure, especially on the bigger blogs, but are they really relevant? Before you’re blinded by the numbers, ask yourself if you really need anything in that list. Very often these lists aren’t even categorized, but are just a large collection links to the sources. No explanation of what the resources are, how they came to be, how you could best integrate them into your project, or why they are of whatever quality they are. Again, the important thing is to be aware.

Rules, Guidelines… Whatever

Here’s some more of that advice stuff for you, you’ll appreciate it, I promise.

• Before you decide to use freebies/free resources (and make it a conscious decision please), consider the alternatives: Learning to do things yourself, and collaborating with or seeking help from others.
• If you do use free resources, do not make them the centerpiece of your work. However free they may be, they are not yours, you did not make them. They can add to what you already have, nothing more
• Consider using the freebies only as reference material. This way you still learn new things, but can speed up the process significantly
• Try to find freebies that are more obscure and less widely used. Blogs with tens of thousands of RSS subscribers are great and all, and I’m really jealous, but everyone else and their pet ferret are going to be using those freebies too.

An Apology

To those of you who actually expected 81.5 trillion anything, I’m sorry. It was just a cheap but still pretty awesome gimmick to get you interested. It was all a lie…

Except for the jelly beans!