Free to use images, or design yourself? Please help!

pinkie_pie

This might be a silly question but I'm honestly a bit flummoxed. How do mums who work from home find images and designs to use? For example, I'm hoping to start a craft that needs stencils, which I was hoping to make myself. I understand about all the free fonts you can find for writing but what about pictures? Like all the owl and bird images that are so popular currently, does every single person design them themselves? For sewing projects or business cards or all the millions of places you see them? And how?! Or is there a resource for things like that?

Tiexen

Something like this:

CraftArtist Greeting Cards

CraftArtist Greeting Cards is the perfect software for creating high quality cards for all occasions. You can even print out your design as separate items to cut out and stick on by hand.

http://www.serif.com/AllProducts/Software/DigitalCrafts/

Benet

Worth mentioning that all those "free" fonts might not necessarily be free for you. They may indeed be free for personal use, but chances are you'll need to licence it for commercial use. Most downloaded fonts will come with a readme file, check it out to keep yourself right

Owain_Moneysaver

If you use Google Images search, there are advanced options where you can search for only images that are freely usable for personal or commercial use.

There are also stock photography websites where you can download photos for reuse on payment of the appropriate fee.

Doofer911

As mentioned in the post above, your best bet is to find a site which has "stock images" or photos which are basically royalty free pictures which you can use without fear of copyright infringement. Some sites out there are free but you will need to register on them.

Of course you can design your own images on a computer but this would require using some software like Photoshop. It takes a few hours to get used to but if you got a logo or picture clear in your mind then you can create it exactly how you want, and there's 1000's of tutorials out there with step by step guides to using photoshop or other software.