This is the walkthrough for actually building something you can sell — not just the idea of it. By the end you'll have a finished pack of images, zipped up and ready to list, made entirely with free tools.
Disclosure: this post contains an affiliate link to Payhip. If you sign up through it, I may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.
What You're Building
A themed set of five to ten images, all sharing a subject or a style, packaged as one download. A set of desktop wallpapers, a collection of art prints, a run of social media backgrounds — the format doesn't matter much, but the theme does. A set that hangs together reads as a considered product. Five unrelated images don't.
Pick a theme now, before you generate anything. "Moody mountain landscapes at golden hour" is a theme. "Nice pictures" isn't.
Some starting points, if you want a shortlist rather than a blank page: moody landscape wallpapers for phones and desktops, minimalist botanical line art prints, retro travel poster designs for cities or countries, abstract gradient backgrounds for social media, seasonal illustration sets (autumn, Christmas, spring florals), fantasy or sci-fi environment art, cosy interior or reading-nook illustrations, and simple pattern sets for planner or journal covers. Any of these works as a five-to-ten piece pack, and none of them require you to draw a single line yourself.
Step 1: Generate the Images
You have three genuinely free options, and it's worth trying more than one, because the same prompt produces noticeably different results from each tool.
Bing Image Creator — free with a Microsoft account, no card needed. Good general-purpose results, fast, no daily limit that most people hit in practice.
ChatGPT — the free plan includes image generation but with a daily limit, typically a handful of images before you have to wait. I use the paid plan myself, but the free plan produces the same image quality — you just have to be more deliberate with each prompt so you're not wasting generations on something vague, and you may need to spread the work across two or three days rather than doing it all in one sitting. That's a completely reasonable way to build a pack. There's no rule that says it has to happen in one session.
Gemini — also free, and worth knowing two things about it. First, images generated through the Gemini app currently carry a visible watermark in the corner, but the web version at gemini.google.com lets you turn it off. Go to Settings in the bottom left, select Media Watermark, and switch it off. It's a global setting, so it stays off for everything you generate afterwards until you turn it back on. I've found the web version more reliable for this than the app, which has been inconsistent about actually applying the setting. This only removes the visible mark — Google still embeds an invisible signal in the file for authenticity purposes, which doesn't affect how the image looks or sells.
Second, in my own use Gemini hasn't kept pace with ChatGPT on rendering complex or dynamic scenes — anything with detailed composition, dramatic lighting, or a lot happening in the frame tends to come out flatter and less convincing than the same prompt run through ChatGPT. Where Gemini does genuinely well is simpler, more graphic output: flat icons, clean patterns, basic shapes and colour blocks, simple backgrounds. If your pack idea is more graphic than photographic or painterly — think seamless patterns, minimalist wallpapers, simple line art, or icon sets — Gemini is a perfectly good, free option for it. For anything more atmospheric or scene-based, like the landscape example above, I'd lean on ChatGPT or Bing first and treat Gemini as the tool for the simpler half of your pack ideas.
Writing Prompts That Actually Work
The difference between a pack that looks professional and one that looks like a first attempt is almost entirely in the prompt. Name the subject, the mood, the lighting, the style, and the format you need.
Weak: "a nice mountain landscape"
Strong: "a vibrant digital painting of a mountain lake at golden hour, dramatic sky with warm orange and pink clouds, detailed pine trees in the foreground, painterly brushstroke style, high contrast lighting, portrait orientation"
Use the same core style language across all your prompts for this pack — same lighting mood, same rendering style — so the finished set looks cohesive rather than like five different artists made it.
A Trick Worth Knowing: Separate the Image From the Text
Sometimes you'll get a generation you love — the composition, the colours, the mood are all right — but the text the model has rendered onto it isn't quite good enough, or you're low on generations for that tool and don't want to spend another one gambling on the text alone. There's a simple fix: regenerate the same prompt with the text element removed entirely, so you keep the strong image and add the words yourself afterwards.
You can add that text back in Canva, which has a wide range of font styles on the free plan and lets you position and size text properly over the image. Or, if you're working from your phone, most phones now have a built-in text-overlay tool in their own photo editor — I do this myself on a Google Pixel, which has a genuinely good set of fonts built in, and it's often faster than opening a separate app for a quick single-line title.
This also has a side benefit worth knowing about: adding your own text pass over a generated image is a small but real way of putting your own hand into the finished piece, rather than the whole thing being a single untouched generation. It's a legitimate way to make a pack feel more like your own work.
Step 2: Review and Select
Generate more than you need. For a pack of five, expect to generate eight or ten and pick your best five. Look for consistency of style across the set as much as the quality of any single image — one beautiful image that doesn't match the others will weaken the whole pack more than it strengthens it.
Check each image at full size before moving on. A flaw that's invisible in a small preview can be obvious once someone downloads the full file, and that's the kind of thing that generates refund requests rather than reviews.
Step 3: Prepare Them for Sale in Canva
Open Canva's free tier and create a new design at the size your images need to be — standard print size if these are meant to be printed, or a social-friendly ratio if they're digital wallpapers or backgrounds.
Upload each image and place it into its own page. Add a small watermark across preview versions if you're planning to show sample images in your listing — a text overlay at low opacity is enough to stop someone screenshotting a full-resolution copy instead of buying it, without needing the buyer to see it on their actual download.
Export each finished image as PNG for anything digital, or PDF for anything meant to be printed. Canva's free export covers both.
Step 4: Package the Pack
Put all your finished, exported files into one folder on your computer. Select them all, right-click, and choose "compress" or "send to compressed folder" — this works natively on both Windows and Mac with no extra software needed. That gives you one zip file containing your whole pack.
Name the zip file something clear and specific — the pack's actual name, not "final" or "images2."
Step 5: List It on Payhip
Set up a free Payhip account if you haven't already, upload your zip file as the product, write a short honest description of what's included, set your price, and publish. The whole listing process takes a few minutes once the pack itself is built.
A Positioning Trick Worth Using: Include the Prompt
Something I do with a lot of my own packs: I include the actual prompt I used alongside the image, and I make sure that's visible and easy to find — in the Payhip product description, and again on the Pinterest pin description when I'm promoting it. Buyers genuinely want this. It lets them regenerate variations of what they bought, tweak it for their own use, or learn from seeing exactly what produced the result.
One important distinction here: I wouldn't recommend trying to sell prompts on their own as a standalone product. That market is heavily saturated, and a lone prompt pack is a needle in a very large haystack. It's a completely different story when the prompt comes bundled with the finished image it produced — the image is the product, the prompt is a bonus that adds real, visible value on top of it. That combination is far less common than either a plain image pack or a plain prompt list, and it's a genuinely easy way to make your listing stand out.
What This Actually Gives You
A real, finished, listed product — built entirely with free tools, without needing to draw a single line yourself if that's not your skill. The generating and arranging is the mechanical part. The theme and the consistency are what make it worth buying.
You just built a product. Now give it somewhere to sell.
A free Payhip store takes your zip file and turns it into a working checkout in about ten minutes.
List Your Pack Now