Best Free Scientific Illustration Resources

You don't need a paid subscription to make professional scientific figures. A handful of free, open-licence libraries and tools cover most of what researchers need — icons, vector illustrations, organism silhouettes, and the software to assemble them. This guide rounds up the most reputable free resources, with notes on licensing so you stay on the right side of attribution rules.

A note on licences first: "free" is not one thing. CC0 assets need no attribution; CC BY requires you to credit the creator; some assets restrict commercial use. Always read the licence for each individual asset and keep a list of any attributions your paper needs to include.

Icon & illustration libraries

Bioicons is an open-source library of well over 2,000 science icons spanning biology, chemistry, and machine learning, released under permissive CC0, CC BY, or MIT licences — ideal for quick, clean schematics. NIH BioART (the BioArt Source from NIAID) offers more than 2,000 high-quality, professionally drawn vectors and icons — cells, microbes, lab equipment, anatomy, chemical structures — free for use. SciDraw is a free repository of high-quality SVG drawings of animals, organisms, and experimental setups, great for presentations and posters. Servier Medical Art provides over 3,000 medical and biological visuals (commonly under a CC BY licence). For evolutionary and organismal work, PhyloPic offers silhouettes of life forms with per-image licensing clearly stated.

BioRender's free tier (with a caveat)

BioRender has a large, polished icon library and a free plan, which is fine for learning, slides, and lab meetings. The important caveat: the free tier is for educational use only and does not grant the right to publish in a journal, and it caps how many illustrations and objects you can use. If you want a no-cost route to a publishable figure, the open-licence libraries above paired with free software are the safer choice.

Free software to assemble it all

Inkscape is a free, open-source vector editor — the natural home for combining icons into 2D figures, multi-panel layouts, and clean line art, with publication-ready SVG, PDF, and high-resolution exports. Blender is free and open-source for anything 3D: molecular structures, realistic materials, lighting, and cover-quality renders. Neither restricts commercial or publication use. Together with the icon libraries, they form a complete, zero-cost pipeline from raw idea to journal-ready figure.

Putting it together

A practical free workflow looks like this: pull the icons and base illustrations you need from Bioicons, NIH BioART, or Servier; assemble and annotate them in Inkscape for a 2D abstract, or build any 3D element in Blender; keep a running note of each asset's licence and required attribution; then export at your journal's resolution and format. The result rivals paid tools — the only investment is a little time learning the software, which pays back on every future figure.

A word on quality and accuracy

Free assets are a starting point, not a guarantee of a good figure. Mixing icon styles, overcrowding the canvas, or using a symbol that doesn't quite match your science will still produce a weak abstract. Keep one consistent icon style, use a limited colourblind-safe palette, and make sure every element is scientifically appropriate. The tools are free; the clarity still comes from you.

Related reading: Free vs Paid Scientific Illustration Tools and Blender for Beginners: A Researcher's Guide.