Dear Indie | I Didn’t Know I Could Do That! (Free resource post)

Hi Indies!

Did you know you could make your own vectors AND remove the backgrounds from any image for FREE –without using Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, or Gimp?

I didn’t! Not until I was determined to combine one of my drawings with a photo. Normally, I would purposely set out to find two images with the same color background, so I can use the “arrangement” feature to lay one on top of the other…

Um…

Since that obviously wasn’t going to work having different color backgrounds, I tried using the transparent filter to make one bleed through the other, but it was way too faint…

Yikes!

Frustrated that I wasn’t getting the effect I was looking for, I thought about my last couple of resource posts and how I’d run across that site with a free SVG editor and got the idea that maybe if I could turn my drawing into a vector, instead, then I might be able to give it a transparent background.

I found this free site: PNG or JPG to SVG Converter. It took some messing around with the palettes to get the colors just right, but the nice thing is that you don’t have to download anything until you’re happy. You do, however, have to re-generate your SVG image if you don’t like the end result because it will only let you change each palette color one time, as you can see here:

In this screen shot, I’ve already changed the first two colors on my vector, if I get done and decide the second one isn’t dark/light enough, I have to click “Generate” under the original image on the left and start all over again.

Once I was really happy with the colors and downloaded my new vector, I went back to the site: Public Domain Vectors and used their free editor to turn my SVG file into a PNG. Unfortunately, this did not automatically make the background transparent the way I thought it would.

So, I went back to Google and found this awesome and super handy site that I foresee myself using A LOT in the future, called: Online PNG Tools. If you’re just wanting to remove the background of a picture, of course you would just start here and skip the whole SVG vector creation part. Scroll to the bottom of the site’s page to see all of their available tools. I haven’t checked them out yet, but I didn’t notice any SVG tools, so I will still have to hop around a few different sites to complete one image from my artwork, but it’s better than not being able to do it at all – or worse, having to pay someone else to do it for me!

And so, with my newly created clip art, I was finally able to create the graphic I was hoping for. Truthfully, it was just for a blog post, but hey, at least now I know how to do this for marketing purposes! 😀

❤ Until next time, Indies!

Legal: The artwork depicted in this post is copyrighted by me and may not be used for any reason. Thank you!