Well, June 2009 was my best month ever on microstock! To this article I also added one „history“ graph, showing my earnings for nearly three years in microstock. You can see, that the earnings are bigger and bigger – that’s because I’m not lazy and my portfolio is growing.
Microstock for designers – where to buy photos and illustrations (updated)
As a webdesigner I need quite often some photo or illustration for my graphic designs, or as a part of the website content. At the beginning of my career I used some free stock photo sites, but after some time I realized, that the searching of the right photo took me quite a long time and the result is poor. So I started to use microstock – you can get there photo from few cents and the microstock agencies have really big portfolios (some of them have more than 6 millions items!) and the quality is excellent.
Microstock earnings report – May 2009
In the middle of the May I made a decision, that I will post my microstock earnings here on my blog. Actually I don’t want to post here my my earnings in dollars (I don’t want to boast about my earnings), but I want to show the trends – if the earnings are going up or down (I’m quite stable in submitting). The graphs also show you, what are the best microstock sites for selling images – that’s the reason, why there are 2 graphs – one showing the money and another showing number of submitted images.
June juicy calendar
For this month’s desktop wallpaper calendar (created for Smashing Magazine) I used my stock photo of fresh strawberries, which I made a couple years ago.
Here it is:
If you want to use such photo for commercial purposes, download it from some microstock site (for example here on Dreamstime), or contact me.
How to prepare vector illustration for microstock sale
On most microstock sites accepts vector illustrations in EPS format (in version Illustrator 8) with generated JPG preview of the illustration. Some of them wants it in ZIP, some need just small preview and others big. In this article I will show you the best and easiest way, how to prepare the illustration in desired EPS format and how to generate JPG preview.
How to create your own brush in Illustrator
In this tutorial I will show you how simple is creating of a new Art Brush in Adobe Illustrator and how you can then use it for creating wonderful illustrations – like the attached floral women portrait. You can draw above mentioned image within few minutes – you just have to create the silhouette of the face and then prepare art brush an use it for hair.
May calendar for Smashing Magazine
For May desktop wallpaper calendar (created for Smashing Magazine) I used parts from my older illustrations, that I’m selling on microstock – pencil, label and squared paper. Here is the result:
How to set illustration’s color mode to RGB
Sometimes Shutterstock rejects some of my illustration with this message:
Color Profiles – Your image contains both RGB and CMYK color profiles. Please resubmit your vector with only 1 color profile.
The problem is that I used (during the drawing of this illustration) some CMYK color – maybe I took if from some swatch, or I used part of some other illustration, which was in CMYK mode. It is quite easy to convert illustration back to one – RGB – color mode.
April calendar for Smashing Magazine
I created an April desktop wallpaper calendar for one of the best sites: Smashing Magazine. It is just really simple wallpaper calendar made from standards icons on the desktop:
