Favorite resources

Some of my favorite resources for stock images to use in manips:

Burning Well . A selection of public domain stock images. It's a small site, but they have some nice cityscapes in particular.

stock.xchng . A massive selection of free stock images across all genres. You have to have an account, but it's free. They are owned by iStockPhoto, so they always give you some "premium" (e.g. costs money) search results in addition to the free images, but the free image gallery is very extensive and iStockPhoto does have some good stuff if you are willing to pay for it. I particularly appreciate their selection of vehicles which have already been cropped and put on a white background, which makes it easy to cut them into a scene. For example, this tank, or this plane.

CG Textures . Massive and awesome selection, focusing on textures, but covering a massive range. They have smoke and fire images on black backgrounds, which are easy to filter out with "Color to Alpha". They have skyscapes, which make great backgrounds for flying scenes. They have vehicles, landscapes and paint splatters. You can easily lose a day browsing their selection.

image * After Over 20,000 free images and textures. This is a great site for random stuff. I've been meaning to turn this into a "bullet bouncing off a super eyeball" pic for a while. I love having supergirls destroy the Eiffel Tower , because it's so recognizable. This site is based in Europe, so it's great for images from that continent.

Reddit Spaceporn . High-res space images. If you see something you like, save it, because it may not be there when you go back.

Reddit Earthporn . Landscapes and exotic images from around the world.

Other random resources:

mygimptutorial . Some interesting links and tutorials here.

Brush Lovers . A selection of brushes for photoshop or gimp, some free and some paid for.

The Design Inspiration . Random selection of articles and patterns, including this selection of sexy girls, this gallery of gross anti-smoking ads, which might make the basis of some gory bad supergirl victims, this set of fire-breathing photos, and Lara Croft-a-polooza .

Good sources for "base" images:

Online costume stores. They often have a large resolution image used for zooming, women in costumes and white backgrounds that are easy to filter out.

E.g. www.go4costumes.com/ . You sometimes have to work to get the image at a decent resolution. You can go through google image search and try to find the image you want, or go to the site and use browser tools.

For example, this greek goddess, this villainess, or this supergirl.

If you have Chrome, you can click the little spanner in the top-right, go to "Developer Tools", open the "resources" tab and try to find the large version of the image. You can then save that image and go from there. You could even upload all three into an imgur gallery and share it, like this .