1. Stumbleupon – This application isn’t just about blog-surfing. With a few clicks, Stumbleupon can be set to cycle through art pages, illustrations, painting styles and periods, even tutorials, to give you instant inspiration for your next project. Try entering genres like painting, drawing, sculpture and graphic design.

2. GIMP – Like Photoshop, GIMP is a tool for photo-manipulation. Unlike Photoshop, it’s free. GIMP can do photo retouching, image composition and can be used as a simple paint program. It comes with a full suite of painting and blending tools, and lets you create custom brushes and patterns.

3. Color Scheme Designer – Using a color wheel and selection tools, you can quickly find complementary colors, triads, tetrads, analogic and accented palettes. Color themes can also be imported into Photoshop and Illustrator as swatches.

4. DaFont – Need a free good quality typeface? With options like “Fancy,” “Foreign look,” “Gothic” and “Techno,” you can find exactly what you want here.

5. What the Font! – If you need to match a typeface but can’t figure out what it is, upload a screenshot of it to What the Font! and this website will find the answer for you.

6. Creative Commons – This search service uses other search engines like Google, Yahoo and Flickr to find photos, music and text that is free to share or change. You don’t have to worry about copyrights since the images are pre-screened as free to use.

7. Art Education 2.0 – A free website for art educators where you can collaborate, debate, and share ideas and experiences with other professionals.

8. Sketchcast – When you want to show your students exactly how to do something, use Sketchcast. This fun web program records you drawing with audio so you can explain every stroke of your digital brush.

9. ScreenToaster – Similar to Sketchcast but without the audio recorder, this free screen recorder doesn’t require a download and is compatible with pretty much every system.

10. TubeChop – If you’ve found a YouTube video that you want to share with your class but you don’t want the whole thing, TubeChop lets you be your own film editor.

Here are five free online web applications for showing off your artwork –

1. PiZap – PiZap is a free online photo editor which is super easy to use. It lets you create one-click effects on your digital photos that can be as wacky and silly as you want them to be. The fun elements here outweigh hardcore functionality; so don’t expect any advanced filters and effects – you have Photoshop for that. The themes, embellishments, add-ons, and stickers that are available to give your image a total makeover make this an amusing web app – one that is ideal for social networkers looking for fun with pictures. Go here for an informative comparison of 15 online photo editors.

2. Sumo Paint – Sumo Paint is a great interactive platform for all those looking for an outlet for their creativity. The free web app is feature-rich, and includes features such as layers, shapes, filters, zooming, symmetry tool, gravity, swatches, smudge, and more. It is probably one of the best if not the best application out there for image enthusiasts that wish to create, edit, and share images online. The application does not hog bandwidth and is very user-friendly. You can register in a jiffy and get started on creating your own masterpieces, be they landscapes, abstract art, cartoons, geometrical designs, etc.

3. Ideone – This one is not so much about showing off your art in its final form; however, it’s a great collaborative tool for online artists. Ideone lets you share code with friends. A great tool for sharing and collaborative debugging of code so that the GIFs and animations that you create are neat. Presently, the application supports 38 programming languages. The code you paste gets automatically checked for bugs, you can share it via social bookmarking sites and also a hash link that is created when you submit the source code.

4. FlockDraw – A seamless real-time collaborative drawing tool that lets people from all over come together and work on a drawing project – so long as it’s a fun project. It’s a fairly straightforward application with a streamlined feature set. It will be great if the application develops into one that serious artists can use, it surely has the potential. As of now it is more of an interface on which you can create and edit doodles and drawings with your friends located elsewhere. That said, it is still a nice free web app that artists can use creatively and have fun with.

5. You Convert It – An all-in-one file conversion and file sharing web app that lets you share images, text, videos, and much more. It’s a useful application for changing formats of media files so that these can be shared easily between multiple parties. The site is a neat bridge that spans different software types and versions used to develop content. Convert your video masterpiece into an MP3, wav file, flash video file, real media file, etc. You can even use the application to send files of up to 1000 MB to friends. You can add 5 files at one time.

The web apps mentioned here are great ones but there are many more superlative web apps out there that you can use to create and share your art. Vozme, for example converts text into audio. A nice way to share your award-winning short story with a visually challenged friend. The usefulness of these applications is limited only by the imaginative ways in which you can combine and use them.