How to Find Royalty-Free Images for Inspiration and Color Stories
Photos help tell the story of the collection whether through color, theme, or mood.
The issue is: not all photos are fair-game. Most times, photos are owned by the photographer and use is prohibited.
The last thing you want is to create a beautiful inspiration board, only to find out you can’t use one of the photos.
The solution to this is using royalty-free material.
Royalty-free material means you can use it in your work without paying royalties or license fees. In short, it’s free to use.
These days, you can find a ton of amazing royalty-free inspiration photos online.
I’ve made a list of my favorite royalty-free resources for gathering inspiration for fashion design mood boards.
For fun, I’ve included an inspiration photo with a color story from each of the below resources.
Vangogh Museum
This online database features art by Vincent van Gogh and other works of his time. My favorite section of the gallery is French Printmaking. These works are bright and colorful and made by lithography, etching and woodcuts.
The British Library
The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom. It’s one of the world’s greatest libraries, holding over 13 million books.
The British library’s collection on Flickr Commons includes millions of images in the public domain. Many of the images are digitised from over 65,000 books from the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. Over time more public domain collections will be added.
There are various albums within the photo stream including Fashion and Costumers, Flora, Decorations and Designs, Book Covers, and Portraits. So much inspiration!
Watercolour World
If you couldn’t guess from the title…this website features a whole world of watercolours.
This site is fascinating. You can explore watercolor through a world map, searching for paintings from a specific area in the world. I searched for paintings from my home land of Long Island, New York and found paintings of the area from before 1900!
Wellcome Collection
Most of the artwork in the Welcome Collection were acquired between 1890 and 1936 by Sir Henry Wellcome. The artwork reflects Wellcome’s interest in science, health, and medicine.
The collection features an impressive set of artworks on botany.
Pink flowers, possibly chrysanthemums, arranged in a bottle. Watercolour attributed to M. C. Stopes, 1898.
Unsplash
Unsplash features beautiful and free photographs from 110,000 contributing photographers. The site has a growing library of over 1.5 million photos.
Pixabay
Pixabay features over a million high quality stock images and videos. It’s easy to search for specific subjects on this site.
Pexels
Pexels is similar to Unsplash and Pixabay
I have to thank the internet and the millions of creative contributors who make it possible to be inspired by an endless stream of inspiration. How cool is it that our civilization has all these silent collaborations between photographers, watercolor painters, historians, fashion designers, and other creative individuals? It seems that now, more than ever, the spirit of creativity and collaboration is alive!