Our Favourite FREE Art!

by Everly Brown

It's that time of year where families and older students are starting to get into the back to school head space. I'll be returning to school as well and a big part of what I do before the semester starts is reorganize my office. I add things, remove things, change the furniture around and maybe this year I'll paint! In addition to changing up my white walls, I'd love to add some prints. There is absolutely beautiful artwork out there, ready to be printed and I've picked some of my faves to share.

The Visions of the Future series from the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory is perfect for the science and science fiction nerds (AKA me). You can read about the background and get the artists' names here. They are free to download, and once you have the files you can adjust the images and get them printed in different sizes. If you order a poster on the JPL site, it's only available in 20 x 30 inches.

Here's my top 3 Visions of the Future:

I created a fine art print in the Design Lab with the Jupiter image. You could order the image to be printed as a digital print, a poster, a wood print etc. but the fine art print really does the colour and intensity of these images justice.

For those who love to read, PBS has fantastic travel posters based on books which they created for The Great American Read television series. They are PDF files which is ok for home printing, but to print with Art of Where, I had to convert the PDF to a JPEG and adjust the size to one we offer. Luckily there are sites that make converting to JPEG easy peasy, and I changed the size in MS Paint (I'm a writer not a graphic designer)!

Here's my top 3 travel posters:

Check out the preview for a wood print I created in the Design Lab. I definitely want this in my office over my bookshelf!

Another amazing site for free art is the New York Public Library Digital Collections. When you search you can choose to search only public domain materials. Once you find an image you like, you can download it in a selection of formats, including high resolution TIF. I downloaded a few I like, and adjusted them so I could print them as 8 x 10 art prints. They aren't perfect images, but imperfections are part of the vintage charm!

If you've made something neat with Art of Where + public domain or free to use art, post pictures in the comments. We'd love to see!