Snowflake Challenge Day #5

Challenge #5

In your own space, tell us about 3 creative/fannish resources, spaces, or communities you use or enjoy.

Okay, I am going to give you some resources if you are interested in making icons or graphics. The majority of the resources I am going to share are for photoshop, because that is what I am most familiar with, some of them you can also use on other services but you'll have to check.

First off, I would like to recommend the community icon_resources it doesn't get a lot of traffic, but every once and awhile people will drop off links to free texture packs (i.e. backgrounds or overlays) that you can use for your icons, you can also find a few of my own texture packs over there as well.

Secondly, if you have ever seen icons with fancy swirly or circle text like this one of mine:



and wondered how they did that, there is a great tutorial here that takes you through the steps.

If you have ever wanted to just make photos prettier, maybe give them a little more colour or vibrancy, there are nice free LUTs here, the vlog says they are for videos, but I have used them for still photos and they have turned out great, Pastry Wonderland is annoying in that it almost always makes pictures look better.

I really like these free torn paper brushes that can be used for a nice tear away effect. I used them on this cover art, which I think turned out really well. There are lots of free brushes and other resources on Deviantart, but sometimes you have to really go digging for them.

If you are interested in making graphics with photoshop there are lots of tutorials on YouTube, I follow quite a few channels, but I highly recommend Blue Lightning TV, he takes his time and goes though the process step by step, which is great if you are following along.

If you read this and thought "that's great kingstoken, but I don't have photoshop" may I also suggest the free version of Canva, it has lots of free plug and play templates (if it doesn't have a $ in the corner it's free), including bingo cards, I made this year's book bingo card with Canva. They also have book covers, so if you have ever wanted to make a cover for your fic here is an easy way to do that, here is an example of a fic cover I made with Canva awhile ago.

One last thing if you are looking for royalty free stock photos for your fic covers, moodboards, or icons I highly recommend Unsplash, they have 1000s of beautiful photos and most of them are free to use for non-commercial projects (the ones you have to pay for have watermarks across them, so just ignore those ones).  The photo I use in my example fic cover was from Unsplash.

I hope this was helpful!

100 Fandoms Masterpost (2023)

Icon table for 100fandomicons ( Masterpost )