Try going to www.clipart.com and searching about to see if anything there takes your fancy. Focus on the art/line art/photos. The model is that if you want to use stuff you subscribe to the site for a certain length of time. During that time you can download and use as many items as you like. So if you have a good idea of where useful stuff is first, you can get it all for (IIRC) about $18.

Another option is to take photos yourself and do arty things with them in graphics software.

Tim Gray
Silver Branch Games
www.silverbranch.co.uk

Thanks for that suggestion. I've been having a browse through their gallery to see what kind of stuff they have. There's an awful lot of images in here that are basically old masters that have been converted to greyscale with varying degrees of skill. Makes me wonder how easily I might find a usable source for old paintings.

Ash

There are a lot of copies of old master paintings on Museum sites with varying degrees of free access, you could try working with them.

Is your subject dream or nightmare based? If the later then you could look at Bosch and similar who are old enough that there will be free access versions of their work online.

Or you can prevail on nice friendly artists to do work for cheap?

Solipsist RPG, on its way ... eventually

It's both in equal measure, and it's funny you should mention Bosch because I've been looking at his work amongst others as possible candidates, along with Dali, Munch and Escher. The basic concept for the game is that the characters are dreamers who are capable of moving beyond the boundaries of their own dream and visiting other peoples', where they can give them nice dreams or horrible nightmares, steal the ideas clean out of their heads, psychoanalyse them and provide therapeutic aid, or just mess with their minds for kicks and giggles. It's a rather surreal setting inspired in part by an old computer game I once picked up on the cheap whose name escapes me for the time being.

It'd be nice, but I am really skint right now, like really, really, really skint what with christmas and all, and I don't like feeling that I'm taking advantage. That's why I'm thinking mostly in the direction of clip-art and out-of-copyright works.

Ash

Some of us like drawing for it's own sake, as long as the images are not too large or too complex :) Others are willing to do gaming art jut to be gaming artists.

Which is a long way of saying that I might have time to draw something for you if my style happens to fit your needs

Solipsist RPG, on its way ... eventually

...is to publish the game sans-art. The original Dogs in the Vineyard only had a cover piece.

Then you can add art if necessary at a later date for a deluxe print version, or whatever, and pay for the art out of profits of the non-art version.

Oh, and just a note to avoid the conversation moving towards "artists working for free because the publisher is low on cash". That's a different discussion and one that we've had elsewhere.

Free alternates are images from old books that are now out of copyright. I'm sure Polaris and 1001 Night use this method. This site might be handy: http://www.princetonol.com/groups/iad/links/clipart.html

istockphoto.com is damn cheap. Don't Rest Your Head got all it's art from there.

{EDIT:} Doesn't this belong in Publishing and not Game Design?

Oh, just to say if something could be in a better forum then it's supercool to flag it up and we can move it. Popular topics live at the top of the recent posts list so people can find the thread easily enough, but for archiving purposes it's good to have them in the "right" place, whatever that is.

Self-taken photographs manipulated in Photoshop (or whatever) could be very weird and suitable for a dreamy game feel. Especially Gaussian filters, Swirls, and some of the Effects in Photoshop's filters.

On cue, the ever appropriate Rob Donoghue posts about istockphoto and why it works best for him.

Indeed. I have copies of the collected works of Hogarth, the fully illustrated Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost all sitting on my shelf just in case I ever make a project that these would be useful for illustrating :)

Errr, possibly, I don't know. Feel free to move it if you like!

Also a great idea, but I'd have to find people willing to pose first. It's amazing how few people I know who will consent to having their photo taken just for holiday snaps, let alone to have them messed around with and put in a book.

Ash

For example, Malc has some amazingly moody shots of abandoned asylums and so on that got used by Paul for some of the Cold City companion pieces' backdrops.

I also recommend iStockphoto, it does some great vector backgrounds. Similarly, if you want to build a library of stock, I also recommend Crestock who do a daily free stock photo available via RSS.

-Matt

Realms Publishing

I totally agree with Matt about the value of taking your own photographs, especially for games with a modern or natural feel. As a result of avid photo taking my wife and I have photos of birds, trees, flowers, dolphins, storms, rainbows, the sea, beaches, marine life, ice, mountains, sunsets, egyptian temples, forests and so much more. I often find perfect artwork just by looking in my own holiday snaps. It doesn't take long to turn them into something usable as artwork if you have access to Photoshop or something similar.

Solipsist RPG, on its way ... eventually

I'm currently having an idea about taking lots of photographs and sticking them together almost at random with really odd subjects, so we get giant mice flying through the air like birds and attacking tiny mouse-sized bears, people being menaced by rampaging toasters and that kind of thing. Some light manipulation and heavy gaussian blurring ought to make it gel well enough for the subject matter, and I reckon the stuck-on, not-quite-real atmosphere ought to be quite surreal and dream-like, though I am worried about it just looking awful too.

Ash

Yeah there's the ever present danger that amateur hour photmanips (photomanipulation being an art form in itself) look freaking awful. From an illustration perspective heavy use of filters is a no-no, and sets you firmly in a certain position. se of photos in games has a long ignoble, ridiculous history, so I'd wanna be careful with that stuff. It can be made of pure horrid which can potentially infect the impact ofthe rest of your game with the audience.

That said, a great deal of rpg art looks freaking awful, (he said with a wry grin as someone who makes feaking awful rpg art) so it could fit, but it depends what you're shooting for. Something workmanlike to fill the gaps in a layout, or to make a nice looking product in some kind of healthy relationship to the state of visual art in rpg publishing.

Even things with a deliberate homebrew/punk edge need some skill to pull off well. For all there is the argument that art doesn't matter, it still gets covered in reviews, matters to punters, adds or subtracts sales, provides good advertising matter and just look at the reaction to action-man Cyberpunk.

For a surreal, psychological/dream game I'd suggest some nicely made Rorschach patterns for breaking up layout. If you can photomanipulate with any ability then working in some photos into the blots could rock really hard. But like anything it'd have to be done well.

Now annoyingly enough I'm tempted to go off and make something like that...

Jon Hodgson
www.jonhodgson.com

I've had a quick dabble and made an example image. I'm not fond of the rough edges, and may redo the whole piece without them later, but I wanted to ask people what they thought of it in general? I found a fantastic filter (yes, it's a filter, I know they usually end up looking amateurish, but I think this one works) that renders photos to greyscale very attractively and helps disguise the fact they are manips too. I've uploaded a sample to my devart gallery. Thoughts and comments much appreciated!

http://destriarch.deviantart.com/art/Filter-Effects-72471506

Ash

I liked it at the smaller preview size, but much less so when seeing it full size, where the fuzzy edges are more annoying and it's much clearer that its a manipulated photo.

You could try making a line art outline version and overlaying it on the fuzzed layer at medium transparency.

Without meaning to be too critical, I don't think it looks very good. It has the appearance of just being a pretty overexposed photo that's had the contrast fiddled with a bit. In the larger size, it just looks rough, scrappy and the picture as a whole is a bit sterile.

Jon gives pretty good advice, that while it is a worthy aim to gain skills in stuff like Photoshop, badly executed photomanipulation can so easily make a game look plain bad. Good photomanipulation can look absolutely fantastic, like the stuff Paul did for the Cold City Companion (the Baby-in-the-jar and the Thing-in-the-house).*

An art-free book may be the way t go in the first instance, using revenue from initial sales to produce an artworked, later version? Nice layout and design can really go a long way to making an art-free product look really good.

Cheers
Malc

*Which is why I leave all the art and design matters to Paul, because my Photoshop skills are only slightly better than my knowledge of advanced particle physics!

Contested Ground Studios

The last version was art free, that's one of the reasons I wanted the new version to be illustrated. Art-free is OK for PDF, but if I'm going to put it through distribution channels people will expect (and, since they're paying a considerable amount more for it, deserve) a bit more than just a bland manuscript. Besides, the product is so bizarre that it really does need images to set the tone and introduce the setting in a more concrete form. I'd love to pay artists to illustrate the book for me, but I just can't afford it any more :( That leaves me with just myself and my own skills. I hate being poor.

The scrappy edges, by the way, were a mistake from a previous filter that I forgot to undo before continuing and it accidentally got saved like that. I since removed them, and it does look better. The thing is, I like the fuzzy, slightly indistinct nature of the picture because that's what dreams are like. The last thing I want is a picture with definition that's as sharp as a pin.

Ash

Tried this, but it just made it look blobby and messy. Thanks for the suggestion though.

Ash

My approach for Jaws of the Six Serpents, for instance, is to use some really nice clipart I found on a front page for each major section, and then have just a few smaller pieces scattered amidst the text. Partly inspired by Hero's Banner, which uses hardly any (too little, in fact, and the layout makes it look like an academic pamphlet, but there are things to be learned).

Do check out the clipart collections at the main sales sites - I'm thinking particularly the Cerberus sets at RPGNow, which are on the more expensive side for clipart but nice if they fit your project. (Some of the demos are wonky, unfortunately - I've let them know.) EDIT - ah no, I was actually thinking of Talisman Studios, which after a quick wrestle with RPGNow which no longer has an art category I find here:
http://www.rpgnow.com/index.php?cPath=3932

You might also look at dingbat fonts in case there are any that might do as page decorations etc. I use this site:
http://www.dingbats-uk.org.uk

Tim Gray
Silver Branch Games
www.silverbranch.co.uk

Thanks for the extra resources to look at Tim. At the moment though I'm desparing at finding anything suitable in clipart and stock images due to the unusual nature of the subject material.

Ash

I'll offer to do you something for free again, provided you happen to like my style of art and it doesn't have too many people in it :P

Solipsist RPG Website

If you're trying to make it look like art rather than Photographs, I'd recommend doing something cheeky like making up all the images, and then once they're all ready to go, download the trial version of Painter X from Corel, and use the autopainting cloning tools to make your images into paintings. It works quite well, and you wouldn't be cheating Corel by downloading a dodgy copy. Painter is a fantastic program, and I wish I had the money to pony up for a real copy (though you can get one for £40 on eBay).

Shevaun

...in space we can't hear artists scream... ;-)

If you look at zuzannah, I think it looks OK without art. I did something for it but held off when I saw how it looked sans art. For me, a book looks better with good art, but no art is better than bad art, y'know?

Dave, thanks for the offer but I'm really not comfortable with sponging off artists and besides the art would be necessarily complex.

Shevaun, thanks for the tip. I'll look at Painter X and see what it can do. I have a few contacts that may be able to cut me a better deal on the price. Sadly I'd be willing to bet that a lot of those eBay sellers are producing pirate software. I've bought a couple of software packages on the 'Bay that turned out to be fakes (fortunately very cheap ones so I didn't lose anything much)

Greg, I agree that no art is better than bad art, but I also think that this is one of those circumstances where artwork will be of immeasurable help in putting the setting across and setting the mood. There's too much here that is beyond the conventional. I'd really like to make it look pretty this time around.

Anyway, it's a long time off yet. Need the cash back from the last book so I can print the next one, then I can worry about another!

Ash