Great Resources

One of the myriad other things that I do is creating digital artwork. My sister's birthday is today, so I made a digital card to send to her. After my father died, I took an old sketch of his of the Rialto Bridge in Venice created a thank you card to send. I mostly do these for myself so I can learn Photoshop, but I have also created some headers for blogs.There are some great resources for copyright free images. First is Microsoft Office's clip art. They have teamed up with iStock photos for photographs and have tons of clipart, photos, animated graphics and sounds. The thing you have to be careful about with this resource is that it's something everyone uses and you don't want your work to look like everyone else's.
Another great treasure is the Dover Publications catalogue. Dover specializes in reprinting copyright free images and books. They have a weekly e-mail with a selection of about ten books and images from them, which you can download. In the old days, when you needed an image, you clipped it from their books and pasted it onto your layout. Now, you just scan it in, or download it from a CD, manipulate it and you're done.
The last resource (that I am going to talk about!) is the New York Public Library. They've digitized more than a half a million images from their extensive collections. These range from the prototypical photo of the Flatiron Building to a huge collection of menus from the late 1800's. All of the images on this site are available for free download, as long as they're not used for commercial purposes, and also as archival prints. Every month, they feature an editor's choice. If anyone has any other resources to add, please share them in the comments!