You art choice can make of break a space but not everyone has the budget to get the unique pieces they want. To help solve this issue, we’ve therefore put together 15 great places to find affordable or free art.
To find bargain art that suits your needs takes time. You’ll find you can spend hours trying to find good websites and even more time choosing the art you want.
Before we get started
In order to save yourself quite a few headaches, we recommend first finding the frame or frames you want to use (here is a list of some budget wooden picture frames that have worked well for us). Secondly, decide a rough color scheme (even if this means every color!). If ready-made gallery walls like this one on Etsy aren’t your thing, we’ve also put together a few selections of low cost art by color. Check out our blog posts on Black and White, Blue or Green color coordinated art. INTERNAL LINKS
What do we mean by free art?
First of all, many people may think that you can download any image from the internet and use it as a piece of art. Don’t do this! You could land yourself in trouble and ethically, it’s just not fair to the artist.
Luckily there is quite a bit of free art that’s copyright free (INTERNAL LINK HERE). This means that the artist or owner no longer has rights and you are free to download as you please.
As is the case with most free things, it’s not going to be ideal for all situations. You may find the size and quality of the file is only suitable for an 8×10 frame at the most. This however, is more than enough for a gallery wall or an art set.
What do we mean by affordable art?
If you’re anything like me, you love unique items. You may also find that, like me, your mind changes quite often and drifts towards new ideas! It’s therefore pretty important that we find a balance between supporting artists by buying quality original art, and finding affordable art we can change up when needed.
So if investment art pieces aren’t in your budget right now, our list of 15 Great Places to Find Affordable or Free Art can help. I have bought from many of these sites but otherwise I have tried to only recommend the places with good ratings and reviews.
- Society 6
- Library of Congress. This a great source of all kinds of historical things including copyright free images. Just make sure you read the small print as it should say there is no known copyright. Usually the Library of Congress has a “free to use and reuse” section that take out the hard work.
- Wikimedia Commons
- National Gallery of Art
- Etsy. You can easily find ready made gallery wall art at Etsy.
- Amazon
- Vintage Books. I love picking up old photography books and using the images to make small pieces of art. I have not included magazines here are they tend to be too transparent but a book with good quality, thick pages will work well.
- Saatchi Art – Yes, you’ll find a lot of very expensive art here but the nice thing about Saatchi Art is that you can sort by price. Those first few pages are usually under $150 and that’s not too bad if you just need one piece of art.
- Magnum Photos
- Inspired By Nature. These guys are one of the best when it comes to highly affordable digital art. Not only can you get the art instantly but you’re getting modern pieces that most digital art shops don’t provide. Downloads are a little more expensive than most places but it’s still dirt cheap. They also give you handy guides about where and how to print to get the gallery look. LINK
- Museum of Contemporary Art
- Pexels
- Pixabay
- DIY From a Thrift Shop. Have you ever seen that abstract piece of art that costs thousands of dollars but you think you could do it yourself? Me too…but oh how wrong I was. My most recent piece of homemade “art” was a wooden picture I painted over. If you stand back, squint a little and look away quickly, you could be fooled.
- Old Vinyl. Love the kitsch look? What about an old Elvis record cover! Some of the best modern and retro art I’ve found has been on album covers and I can usually pick them up for under a couple bucks.