Why and How to Draw Your Own Copyright Free Illustrations

If you are hassled by the legal implications of using other people’s images or you find the process of finding just the right one for your website a bit tedious – why not draw your own?

This page sets out my reasons for creating my own drawings and why I am not ashamed by them.

I am not an artist. But for the purposes of making a web page look attractive and welcoming for a casual visitor there is no need for great skill. Simple drawings with perhaps a light hearted caption can brighten up a page and improve the overall look without a huge amount of effort.

I have tried to give a flavour of why and how I do what I do in the rather lengthy article below. You might want to just scan through and check out the pictures first. I just hope no proper artists visit this page!

And if you think I have a lot of nerve well yeah, perhaps I do but if you think about that guy who painted the famous ceiling somewhere. That's real nerve.

My main purpose is writing rather than drawing, but pages look much better with illustrations or pictures. They help to break up the text, and may attract people who typically scan a page before deciding to whether to read it. An amusing or thoughtful picture may be the final decision point for a searcher.

It takes time to search the web for appropriate images and make sure you can legally use them without running foul of any copyright implications.

It is not always possible to find an exact match for the thought that you want to convey, in the style in which you want to convey it.

Some of the available images have been used so many times on various sites that they are a bit samey. If I see the shower of dollars picture or the coins in a jar I tend to move on. It feels generic and the chances are that the text may be too.

Unique is good. It’s good for the reader and it’s good for Google love (I think).

The downside of photography is that in my opinion it is more limited in the images you can create. I am not a great photographer. I take a picture of something and there it is – a picture of something. Now if I need an image of someone farting in a lift for example that would be quite a challenge to my photographic skills.

With a drawing it is possible to exactly show the idea – well that’s the aim!

I have limited artistic skills. That is probably an overstatement. I have none, would be nearer the truth.

Art was among my least favourite subjects at school, and believe me, taking into account my pretty much total failure there that puts it well down the list.

I can draw a circle, a box, and cartoon style eyes all in a 2D representation. That’s about my limit. I can’t draw horses, pigs, cat faces or a number of things that other non artists can do. My wife can draw better than me, but she can’t draw either (so she says).

So my approach to creating an image is to ensure that I can get the idea across using what is within my skill set. It involves as much thinking as it does actual drawing.

For my main picture for this page I want to show a stickman, which is me, drawing something on an easel. This will give the idea behind doing your own drawing – the purpose of this page. It needs to work at a small size when shrunk for web thumbnails and be different and relatively eye catching.

Have I mentioned it needs to be brilliant drawn and artistic?

No, because it doesn’t need to be.

Sometimes I will try sketching in pencil a few ideas on some scrap paper to see if I can get something that works. Other times I will just go and do other stuff while thinking “how can I represent this?”.

On some occasions I can’t marry up my idea with my capability, so I will have to try a different idea. I am not going to spend hours trying to draw something and get frustrated with it. For me, the ‘art’ is about finding a simple solution to the ‘problem’.

My method is to find the simplest, easiest, non artistic way to represent the idea. Is this cheating? No, I don’t think so. We write within our comfort zone and it is quite reasonable to draw within it too.

I am not going to go down the path of showing you how to draw a stickman. I’ll save that for another page. For one thing I have no idea what you can draw. If the last drawing you did was back in early school then probably neither do you.

So how about getting a bit of paper, after you finish reading this of course? Take a pencil, pen, whatever and just try out some doodles like a stickman, an animal, a house – anything to get the feel of it.

You may hate it or feel ashamed and a bit dirty. Not really, but you may hate it and OK, perhaps it really isn’t for you. Maybe you don’t enjoy it, perfectly understandable.

But it might just be that you find it fun and relaxing. If you see what level I am happy to sink to for illustrating my articles then it might encourage you to put your own efforts on your pages.

Don’t bother asking your family first what they think. Not unless they’re one of those mythical ‘supportive’ families. Pop one quietly on your next article and see if anyone notices. And you can thank me if anyone says “great pic” and you get that warm and fuzzy feeling inside.

I now have a stock of perhaps fifty to one hundred hand drawn images. Given that it can take an hour or so to write a page once editing and thinking is taken into consideration, and thirty minutes or more to create an image – I like to keep the effort in balance.

One new image per article would be nice, but often I don’t create anything new at all. I pick an appropriate picture from my collection and caption it suitably. I like pictures that I can use for more than one idea, it saves time.

Sometimes I will aim my writing in a passage towards a picture that I want to use.

It’s all about maximising output versus effort. I hope that doesn’t sound too lazy. Professionals use stock images all the time.

I may create a set of new images for this page, or one, or none. It depends on how the first draft looks when I set it up. Where do I need pictures? What have I got already created?

I don’t use a graphics package or a computer to draw my pictures. Hand drawn feels warmer to me, more close to the artist than something untouched by human hands.

I do a rough pencil sketch. Colour it in maybe, or emphasise the lines using a felt tip. I noticed that my pictures when just done in pencil and crayon got washed out by the scanning process – so felts are better for me.

I use my scanner, which is just part of my printer / scanner / fax (who uses fax for Chrissakes?) thing. Scan the picture in. Save it. Double click and it opens up Windows something or other which allows me to crop it to size.

I save it in my HubPages Image folder.

Initially I drew my pictures to about the same size as they appear on the page, but obviously, although it didn’t occur at first, it’s better to do an A4 full size one and let the process shrink it down. That way you can lose any inaccuracies, rather than end up magnifying them.

How on earth can I put up childish poorly drawn illustrations on a public web site? This is a genuine question raised by occasional web viewers but more frequently, friends and family.

A lot of people think that you have to be a professional artist to draw, much as you need to be a professional writer to write.

It isn’t so, but it does take a little nerve to put yourself out there. Same with writing of course – those first pages are a lot harder than when you have a lot under your belt.

I got my drawing nerve thanks to HubPages. As I had already spent years writing on forums that wasn’t such a big deal for me. Creating a cartoon picture was a much bigger risk.

When I signed up I needed an image and didn’t want to put my own gurning ugly face on here. Partly for internet security but also because it is essentially gurning and ugly. I hate my own picture… OK?

So I needed and did a quick scribble, scanned it, cropped it and uploaded it. What the hell, I thought. I’m only testing out HubPages here, I have no reputation to worry about, and if it doesn’t fly I’ll be off to Squidoo anyway.

No one laughed at it. No one made rude remarks. No one said “what a crappy picture that is”. One or two said they quite liked it. This gave me a great deal of encouragement.

It was a terrible drawing. Fortunately because I screwed up the cropping and lost some of it, it accidentally became slightly better. There is a ridiculously long arm scratching my head, but it could also be a single hair blowing in the breeze. Maybe from such accidents great art is born.

The thing is that the quick, simple, ‘funny’ drawing is a fairly perfect representation of where I want to be. Humorous, easy going, self mocking and not hung up on perfection. But I didn’t think about that at the time – I just needed a quick picture, minimal effort. Art is in the eye of the viewer, not necessarily the artist.

Since ‘getting away with it’ I have done more, and the occasional “like your pictures” comment convinces me I’m right to do this. It works for me - they have become part of what I do. It might be that I end up doing more cartoons that actual writing. Who knows where we are all heading?

So, as with the writing, I don’t stress so much each time I publish an article. “It will probably be OK” is my internal saying – obviously not quite what you’d expect to hear from someone like Picasso but maybe that’s what they all say.

There are a lot of proper artists on HubPages. I am not going to link to them all because I hate them. Not really, I just can’t be bothered.

However, there is one that I want to mention, because it was his putting together of high quality writing with equally high quality art that originally inspired me. That’s if inspired is not too grand a word for the crap I churn out.

He creates a whole thing when he does an article. Words and pictures that combine to produce more than the sum. And he puts some effort in, more than I can be bothered to match to be frank.

Shadesbreath is the writer and artist, and soon to be novelist, that I am referring to. I owe him thanks for showing me what can be done within this medium.

Do I really need to say "check out his pages"?