What do you do for your Art? (for non-artists)

[KrunchyFriedGames]

So, we've put out one free game, Witches and Bandits and Swords (Oh My) and are working on a second- The Bunny Hill Horror. Both of these games use Deviant Art stock, which I edited for consistency of style in Gimp*. This is fine for free games but we're hoping to start selling games at some point and a lot of stock artists on dA don't allow their work to be used free for commercial purposes- and negotiating pay separately with potentially over a dozen photographers/models sounds like a major headache, espcially as you can't even be sure they're active.

Budget might also be a problem. I'm happy to put down around £100-£200, or share any profit equally between myself, the coder and the artist (currently the coder and I share any money 50/50- although we only get a small amount of ad revenue from Kong/Gamejolt), but I don't know how many artists like working this way.

I'd love to know what you do for the art in your games (or, what you're planning to do), and what your experiences have been, as we're currently a bit stuck at this stage. As far as I can tell, these are our options:

Find an artist online:
I tried this approach with our first coder, and it didn't really work as well as I wanted. In other words, he didn't do anything. For months, and I replaced him with a friend who was willing to learn Unity. The question of whether an artist is happy to be paid 33% of any proft rather than a flat fee might also be tricky. Also, I value dedication above talent, and it's hard to assess that online.

Find an artist locally:
This is my preferred option, as I like working with people I can meet face to face. It'll be easier to convince an artist to work for a percentage as they'll know they can come and find me if they don't get paid! I'm in Manchester so there are a lot of student art groups although, personally, I'd prefer someone a bit older with possibly more realistic expectations. It's just a question of how to find them.

Learn to draw ourselves:
Me and the coder already work full-time jobs and are struggling to do what we already need to do (I'm already having to write, plot, take photos for backgrounds, edit images, publicise the thing etc.- well, I'm sure you know the work involved...).

Take photos of models and edit with Gimp:
I work in a big hospital, so I'm sure I could find enough people, but there are problems with this approach. The main one I've found (from a quick ask-around) is that people are very choosy about how their characters are used. We'd also be limited to contemporary and real-world plot settings unless I want to spend a fortune on dress hire.

Find a stock site suitable for visual novels:
None of the major ones such as 123RF or Shutterstock are really suitable- unless we want every scene in the novel to consist of smiling people with perfect teeth blatantly modelling.

Rip Off Pictures:
Not a serious option, but I thought I'd put this here in the interests of completeness

Use free images:
There seems to be such a limited amount of genuinely free images to use that is probably a non-starter.

Use my own crappy drawings:
Likely to give the game very limited commercial, unless I can somehow pass my complete lack of artistic talent off as 'my own style'!

* There are screenshots for Witches and Bandits and Swords (Oh My) on the Completed Games forum here if you're wondering how this technique looks.

[Mutive]

Lemmasoft has a lot of options under the creative commons license. Some are only for free stuff, true, but there are a few that will allow commercial. This would probably be my first option. After that, 100-200 pounds seems really low, even with revenue sharing. (If I was trying to earn a living wage as an artist, I'd probably pass on that as most games just don't make all that much, alas.)

[KrunchyFriedGames]

Lemmasoft has a lot of options under the creative commons license. Some are only for free stuff, true, but there are a few that will allow commercial. This would probably be my first option. After that, 100-200 pounds seems really low, even with revenue sharing. (If I was trying to earn a living wage as an artist, I'd probably pass on that as most games just don't make all that much, alas.)

True enough, although I'm trying to learn a living (or, at least enough to go part time in my real job) from writing and developing, so paying professional rates for a game that's unlikely to make much money is a non-starter. The perfect option would be to find a semi-decent artist who wanted to be part of the team and happy to get paid as much as me or the coder- that way, they'd also have a stake in helping to publicise the game (plus the consistency of having an artist who'd want to do the next game would be excellent).

Another option might be to find a willing character artist on dA with enough of a decent back-catalogue of characters to knock-together a game out of. Low money- but no work for the artist. Luckily backgrounds shouldn't be a problem for us- a camera and a degree of skill with Gimp can see to those.

[KouhaiChan]

You are in a tough situtation... all i can say is that if i were you, i would learn how to draw myself, or find a friend that is an artist and is willing to work for your asking price. Deviantart is an iffy place to look for various reasons, but its a start. I hope you guys find some place to get your art, best of luck!

[parttimestorier]

You're definitely going to have a hard time finding an artist who's willing to work for a share of the profit, because of course, with a small indie game there's no guarantee that there will be any profit.

What I did was start with small-scale, free projects for game jams. When you're doing something like that, you're much more likely to find artists who want to just collaborate for fun, because it's not too much work and a lot of people enjoy participating in game jams. I also just slapped a Photoshop filter on creative commons photographs for backgrounds. Those projects went well, and while I was working on them, I also worked on saving up some money so that after getting some practice and maybe building up a bit of an audience, I could do a slightly bigger, commercial project.

Some people's processes might differ here, but I also did a substantial amount of the writing and programming (with placeholder art) of my current project before even looking at commissioning artists. I did a lot of thinking about exactly how many facial expressions the sprites need and things like that so that I could afford it and wouldn't need to spend more money later on when I had a new idea or anything. And then I looked through the LemmaSoft recruitment threads for artists who had good examples of their work and seemed professional and experienced. And so far, it's going really well with the ones I commissioned! But I guess the final test of how good my strategy was will be whether I can actually sell a few games this time.

[RoseGardenGames]

I don't know how much my own personal experience can help here, but who knows? For my game, I'm using backgrounds that come with the engine (I'm working in Visual Novel Maker) and then the characters I make in another program. It's not the shiniest looking art, but I like it and it's allowing me to give me all on the game I'm working on in ways that would be impossible otherwise, you know?

There are things you can do as a solo-developer to compensate for the skills you lack in if you can't commission other people to cover those bases, though if you've got an idea solid enough there is always that slim chance you could put a team together from it. You never know. Good luck to you!