Stock Photo Ideas

The time has come. I’ve finally sold enough photos to make my first Dreamstime payout. I know it took quite a long time, but still the border has been crossed. The best thing about this payout was it’s speed. I requested a payout and in a 3 days time the money was already on my PayPal account. Nice service!

I’ve been talking about taking photos and sometimes probbably also mentioned something about vectors. Vectors are quite specific to microstock agencies, as they are accepted here. If you look at any other serious photo stock agency, you won’t find any vectors there. It’s a completely different market. If we return to microstock websites, sometimes drawing vectors is quite easy. One of the easiest and seasonal things to draw are snowflakes. I draw a set of snowflakes for the previous Christmas and the downloads were comming in for the whole year. So it’s a good way to spend your time. Here’s my snowflake set:

Ok, enough talking. Today I’ll show you how to use a free vector drawing software called Inkscape to draw easy and very random snowflakes. I bet you won’t be able to draw two identical ones. At least I didn’t manage to. Here’s the video how I did it:

Here’s the scenario:

1. create two rectangles, one bigger than the other one. Rotate the bigger one by 60 degrees so that it overlaps most of the first square and leaves visible only a triangle. (To rotate the rectangle, click on it to change the arrows at the corners of the rectangle, then press Ctrl key and rotate the rectangle by two steps. each step is 30 degrees.)
2. combine the objects using Path -> Difference. The bigger rectangle should be on the top for this function to work.
3. then cut out some random parts of the triangle to make the pattern of the snowflake.
4. duplicate what’s left from the triangle and flip it horizontally. Align the similar sides after flipping.
5. group the object, duplicate again and flip vertical
6. one of the parts to the bottom so that they don’t overlap. Group the objects again
7. duplicate them once more and rotate by 60 degrees (remember how you rotated the rectangles in the beginning)
8. duplicate the rotated element and rotate by 60 more degrees.

That’s it! You should have a pretty snowflake now! To be honest, I don’t think there area differences if you’re using Adobe products. I just wanted to show that you don’t need Photoshop to create simple and pretty things.

If we return to microstock agencies, the downloads of these vectors are not so high, probably because of easy creation of them, however the set I’ve uploaded to dreamstime has earned me nearly $10.