Gaming on the Cheap- Legal Art!

Book of Arrogance teaser,
teleportation/distortion combo

Right now I'm finishing off getting some pics done for the Dark Revelations Book of Arrogance for its next update and got to thinking on blogging about how it all started on the art side.

Through the process of designing a fully fleshed out gaming system between two people and no budget it came to pass that we decided DRev would be a free hobby project until said time we decide to crowd fund it.  Thus came the hard part, with over a thousand pages of text (albeit more like a few hundred pages if not for font and  page format used for easier reading on mobile devices) what could we do for pictures and art without spending a cent?
   
Certainly deviant art was my first choice for art because it is filled with some stuff that just knocks my socks off!  However, our "can we make a game without too much cash" experiment mitigates the use of the site and certainly we would not use any art from there without permission.  Staying away from this awesome resource is a bit of bummer, but it means we do not have to worry about legalize over contracts, ownership or payments. 

So our choice became limited and sometimes a little strange. 

In all modern gaming books art is important to set the tone and theme with consistency.   I  can spot an exert from Pathfinder simply based on its art style, at least from the main Pazio publishing line.  And its pretty easy to tell what edition of D&D you are looking at by simply flipping through the pictures.   However, this was not going to happen for us.  

I use to do art at one time, even tried my hand at some recently Instagram pic  However this is time consuming, I don't have a scanner or a way to do good book style pictures and compared to some of the art out there I honestly feel quite out classed.  Certainly waiting for months for a piece of art would not make my partner too happy either.  Also I have issues drawing faces and bodies!

So what to do?   Well first off,  we wanted to make sure everyone knows that all art in our books are holding places just incase we get to the pay option.  Secondly, screw thematic art.  If we had done a fantasy heart breaker having art that generally looked all the same would have been really easy!  But with a gonzo post post apocalypse with so many different options of play, it was impossible to find stuff even remotely similar. 

Welcome to the public domain!    


Laurain the vampire/rainmaker
 done in heromachine.
Some after coloring in inkscape

By far my favorite resource, however silly is heromachine.com     You can find a ton of it used throughout our books, its one of our primary holding places for character examples.  For that possibility of getting real artist on board, our plan is pretty simple.  Artist asks "what do you want?"  we say "here's the write up and heromachine pic we did, go nuts."        Not all our creations where successful, but honestly I could play on heromachine all day long, regardless if it's for the book or just for giggles.    

Heromachine doesn't cover everything we need for pictures though.  dragging and dropping body parts to create a character is one thing, but trying to do backgrounds and buildings is a lot tougher.  Its our greatest hurdle to art to be honest.  Without custom art, trying to find things that suit the vision of our world has been a struggle.   

For random art I usually stick with commons.wikimedia.org
simply because it is really easy to tell what the license on the product is, which is super important for me. 

My other resource is morguefile.com  which you have to be a lot more careful on using.  Make sure to stay on the main tab, clicking on istock on similar tabs will take you to some "pay for this" art, which makes me sad they can get away with tagging as public domain for google searches.   

My Personal favorite cover I've done so far
Thank you rock climbing sign clipart. 

If you are wonder how I did the covers of the books, which I'm quite proud of by the way, I got most of my stick figures from pdclipart.org  The rest I cooked up in various programs which I will cover below.    Its filled with lots of classic clip art stuff, and If I had my way (and if there had been enough resources there) the entire book would be 90's clip art.

The other site I had been looking around on is karenswhimsy.com mainly hoping to find feylin and elf stuff.  However, you must be careful here, there are some licensing fee, so the link should take you to the public domain page for it. 

As for software, well I don't have photoshop, and desperately despise Gimp for its lack of a user friendly interface and learning curve, its just not for me.    So I use Smoothdraw 3.2.11,  though I see there's a new version I need to hunt down http://www.smoothdraw.com/

I also love inkscape, its great and intuitive to use, though sometimes lines creation is a bit wonky.  https://inkscape.org/en/  This is the program I used mainly to create the DRev covers, along with my friend.....

PAINT.  yep just good old fashion windows paint.  Ok the newer Win 7 is not too bad, but come on its paint!   Sadly I love it.   

We also use word to crop and size pictures, though it is a bit of hassle sometimes to get it where you want.  Word oddly has some pretty nice picture editing options. like playing with colors and artistic effects. 

So there you have it.  Art in DRev as it stands right now.  Here's hoping for more options in the future.