Make Your Own Art
There are tons of ways to make art like Steven did in AstroNuts from open access copyright free collections!
Most of the collaged art in AstroNuts Mission 1 and 2 comes from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. You can search through that entire collection HERE. You can see images used specifically in Mission 1 are HERE, Mission 2 HERE, and Mission 3 HERE.
The Smithsonian Institution has more than three million images in the public domain. You can search through those HERE. (The AstroNuts teamed up with the Smithsonian to make a little how-to booklet for how to work with this collection. That is HERE.) A lot of Smithsonian art is collaged into AstroNuts Mission 3!
The Biodiversity Heritage Library is amazing resource for plant and animal images. That is HERE.
SO many museums and institutions are putting their collections into the public domain. A few more to look at are The Metropolitan Museum in NYC and The Cleveland Museum of Art.
And most importantly: We’re not stealing! Everything used in these books is in the public domain. The museums and institutions want us to use the art! So please do too!
Now how can you put these images together like Steven does?
The art in AstroNuts was made with a program called Adobe Photoshop. It is great, but it also is not cheap!
An alternative is GIMP, a free open source Photoshop-like program. It can do basically everything Photoshop can do, and again is FREE!
Of course, if just want to collage the old fashioned way with glue and scissors we’ve got you covered too. Below are 8.5” x 11” pdfs you can download and print out to make your own AstroNuts having brand new adventures.
Need inspiration? Here are two remixed bits of AstroArt from one of our first AstroArtists:
