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If you are a graphic designer, you probably know that textures and background images are essential for every project which is related to graphics or design. But where to search for quality images if you can’t find anything usable on your PC?

Web offers many useful resources one should always keep in mind searching for textures. Below you’ll find a hand-picked selection of some useful resources related to textures and background images. We tried to pick the best ones which offer quality and professional content without annoying advertisement.

Following repositories offer “free” textures, which means that you can use them for both personal and commercial projects according to the license mentioned on the web-site you’ve downloaded the images from. The images in this article have been taken from the sites described in this list. Links checked: May/25. 2008

• Dr. Web Textures
  Dirty Brick Walls, Wood, Stone, Grafitti and more… free to use for any project, personal or professional.
• Absolute Cross
  Free Seamless Background Textures – over 500 hundred free seamless textures.
  
• Amazing Textures
  amazing textures – free hi res images to download and use in 3d modeling and animations
• Background City
  free backgrounds, wallpapers and textures
• BEN CLOWARD
  An archive of free texture maps for use in 3D animation
  
• Beta-Soft.Net
  Over 500 Free Textures
• Blender Texture Cd
  This is the collection of textures and materials of the “Blender Texture Disk” – “The Blender Foundation has now decided to open up this content entirely as public domain.
• CGTextures
  Photo textures for 3D artists and game developers
  
• Citrusmoon
  Free Patterns, Tiles, Backgrounds
• FreeFoto.com
  Free Pictures – Picture of Textures. Here you will find over a three hundred pictures of various textures. Bark, Brick, Cobbles, Curves, Glass, Light, Paint, Pebbles, Stone, Tarmac, Water, and Wood.
• gallerie1
  Free Textures
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• Image*After – free textures
  Free high resolution textures. free for commercial and personal news. Daily updates
• PlanIt 3D
  Free 3d models textures
• repeatXY – Find your tileable background image
  A big collection of finest tileable background images for use in web pages. Download for free. Easy, fast and comfortable preview of every image. Searchable by colors.
  
• Spiral Graphics
  Free Tiling Texture Materials – Genetica Texture Packs are high quality collections of royalty-free seamless textures.
• 2D Valley Gallery
  Free Photoshop resources and more for the 2D artist
• Squidfingers / Patterns
  169 Patterns
  
• TextureWarehouse | Free Texture Images
  Free, High Resolution Textures to Designers and 3D Artist. Iimages are licensed under a Creative Commons License
• The Limelite – Textures
  A portfolio of free textures….
• TextureKing
  Throughout this site you will find a growing repository of high quality stock photos that are free for professional and personal use.
  
• Texture Library
  Another free library of textures
• Tirad
  You are welcome to use these textures in your works….
• WebGround
  Thousands of original background textures for your Work.