Lake Superior Rocky and Pebbly Shoreline

Penguin Pete wrote a nice tutorial on how to make 3D pebbles in the GIMP. I haven’t tried the howto yet but trust that it will explain things very well.

He wrote “Grab an example image of pebbles or rocks from online/creative-commons works. Since we’re only going to be sampling them for a few pixels, licensing isn’t as hot an issue,” which prompted me to think about these pictures I took a few years ago on the north shore of Lake Superior in Minnesota. We stayed in a small cabin right off this beach. I wish now I had taken more shots of wet pebbles, as the water brings out the colors better and makes a nice sheen.

Being a fan of free culture, I decided to put these out here as raw material for would-be tutorial users. I usually release my work under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike License, but for this purpose let’s go with the Creative Commons Public Domain License. If you just want to have some pebbles to scatter about, it would be tedious to worry about proper attribution and whatnot. If you find more substantive uses for them, well then that’s perfectly fine also. Use them however you wish!

Click on the pictures for 1600×1200 versions (or 1200×1600 in the case of the lower right hand corner; that one is more to get an idea of what the beach looked like). Also suitable for wallpaper!