curious what illustration resources people actually use consistently, not just bookmark and forget. Free brushes, texture packs, reference libraries, stock illustrations, whatever you keep returning to.
For brushes, Kyle T. Webster’s free Photoshop brushes were legendary before Adobe acquired them, but the ones that come bundled with the Creative Cloud now are a fraction of what he originally offered. For free alternatives, I keep going back to the Brusheezy community packs and specifically the watercolor and ink sets. They’re not as refined as Kyle’s but they have character.
In Procreate, the JESK free brush packs are the ones I’ve used most consistently over the last three years. The pencil and charcoal sets in particular have a texture quality that most free brush packs miss. They feel like real media instead of digital approximations, which matters a lot when you’re illustrating children’s books where editors specifically look for that hand-drawn warmth.
For reference, Line of Action (line-of-action.com) is my go-to for figure drawing practice. It’s completely free and the timed gesture drawing tool is excellent for warming up before a work session. I use it three to four times a week and my anatomical accuracy has improved noticeably over the last year.
Unsplash for photo reference is obvious but I also use the Smithsonian Open Access collection heavily. They’ve digitized millions of artworks, specimens, and artifacts at high resolution, all completely free to use. For someone illustrating nature subjects or historical scenes, it’s an unbelievable resource.
unDraw and Humaaans are both free illustration libraries I use all the time for web design projects. They’re SVG-based so they’re perfect for websites, customizable in terms of colors, and the styles are neutral enough to work across different brand contexts. Not hand-drawn illustration but great for UI work.
Creative Market has a free goods section that rotates weekly and some of the illustration resource packs that show up there are genuinely high quality. I’ve picked up texture overlays, vector illustration kits, and pattern sets just by checking in every Monday. It takes two minutes and over a year you build up a solid collection without spending anything.
For textures specifically, Poly Haven has seamless, high-res textures that are free under CC0. I use them for adding grain, paper texture, and surface detail to digital illustrations. The quality is consistent and the resolution is high enough for print work.
Rawpixel also has a decent public domain illustration collection that pulls from vintage sources. If you work with any kind of retro or editorial illustration style, it’s worth bookmarking.
The resource I keep coming back to more than anything is the Biodiversity Heritage Library’s Flickr collection. They have over 300,000 high-resolution scans of illustrations from scientific publications dating back hundreds of years. Botanical illustrations, zoological diagrams, maps, decorative borders, all in the public domain. If you do any kind of nature illustration or want vintage reference material, nothing else comes close.
For more contemporary resources, Drawkit offers a free tier with customizable illustrations that are well-designed enough to use in professional projects. The style is cleaner and more modern than most free illustration libraries, which tend to look generic.
I’d second what @zara.phantom said about the Smithsonian collection. The depth of that archive is genuinely staggering. I spent an entire afternoon once just browsing their insect illustration collection and came away with dozens of reference images that informed a personal project.
For anyone doing pattern work, PatternPad (patternpad.com) is a free tool that generates vector patterns that you can customize and export. It’s not a library per se, but it’s a resource I come back to constantly when I need a starting point for surface pattern design. The generated patterns are a good foundation to build on rather than a final product, but they save significant time.
From the code-meets-design side, I want to mention a couple of resources that are less conventional but incredibly useful for creating unique illustrations.
p5.js examples and the Processing Foundation’s resource library have hundreds of generative art examples that you can use as starting points for illustration work. It sounds technical, but even modifying the parameters on someone else’s sketch can produce beautiful, one-of-a-kind visual outputs that no stock library offers.
SVG Repo (svgrepo.com) is another one I use constantly. Over 500,000 free SVG icons and illustrations, all searchable and downloadable in formats you can edit in any vector tool. For quick icon illustrations and simple graphic elements, it saves me from drawing things I don’t need to draw from scratch.
The key with @CrispestHaze88’s point about Creative Market freebies is consistency. Check regularly and you’ll build a resource library that would cost hundreds to purchase outright.