I’m looking for an artist to develop an ongoing relationship with to do character portraits and the modern equivalent of game box art for web. This will span genres (horror, fantasy, detective noir) and I want a common aesthetic. I have a small budget.
If you have a relevant portfolio and a rate per item or other measure, please DM me and thanks!
Just curious, but did you get any responses? If you didn’t, then you might need to resort to GenAI and the arty crowd can’t complain, because they had the opportunity to do it themselves and chose not to.
[eyebrow raised in Moderator] 
Please, please don’t use GenAI. Artists (like me) might be skittish because of your professed low budget (that’s why I’m not leaping to do it, personally). Consider photobashing (it’s not that hard) if you don’t have enough funds to hire an artist.
Seconding photobashing.
There are a few good communities for finding artists for games that I’m aware of (I suspect that there aren’t many artists hanging around this forum - understandably for good reason):
Hope this helps!
I love photobashing, and didn’t know there was a term for it.
Everyone has a phone. Always Be Taking Pictures. Not of people. If you see interesting colors, textures, vegetation, sky, street scenes, trees.
I can’t count how many times I’ve been able to crop a random picture on my camera roll and use it inverted or with a filter or adjusting colors as the basis of art.
If you played the Cloak of Darkness demo on ChronicleHub, the ceiling of the opera house image in the foyer is the top half of a picture I took at a wedding reception with ~200 people on the dance floor below who are cropped out.
The art for Cannery Vale is a phone picture I snapped years ago at my Dad’s lake house at sunset and zoomed in to remove anything identifiable and just show sky, clouds, and trees. I found a free vector graphic of a Ferris wheel that was then layered over it and made partially transparent so it looks like it’s behind the trees.
[!example]-
Source photo:
I love this photobashing tutorial! It reminds me of a pair of 30 second films I made a few years ago, in a similar style. The intention was to recreate the look and feel of 1970s comics and sci-fi cover art. In this one I did everything, including the sound design, voiceover and yes, that’s me in the gorilla suit at the end:
This second one was entered in a Doctor Who competition run during the Capaldi era where entrants were supplied with a limited number of clips and music from the show. Our film was a callback to an obscure comic strip from the 1977 Dr Who annual. My friend Mark Bailey did the 3D CGI and voiced the Dalek. I was responsible for all the 2D animation, the overall look and sound design.
Mission Dalek: ‘Mistress of Metalupiter’
I kind of want to illustrate my current WIP in this style now…
Garry, I did not receive any interest. John I’ll check out your suggestions. My fear is I will get AI art anyway - so thought this was a good place to ask since people here are staunchly against.
Typical anti-AI hypocrisy. A IF game developer can spend months/years developing a great game, expecting nothing in revenue, yet forced by the community to shell money out of their own pockets if they want some nice looking graphics to appeal to a broader market. For some reason it’s fine for an indie game designer to put in thousands of man hours without compensation but when the same is asked for image gens, you get crickets chirping…
There’s a big difference between putting in countless unpaid hours of your own time and demanding countless unpaid hours of someone else’s time. The artists I know spend quite a lot of time working on personal projects rather than commercial ones, but those are things they want to do, not things a stranger on the internet demanded of them.
If you want people to do difficult unpaid labor for you, I’d recommend asking nicely (or paying) instead of trying to guilt-trip them and calling them hypocrites when they refuse.
@Harlock asked nicely and offered to pay. They asked for a “rate per item or other measure”. It may just be that this is not the right place to ask for artists, so all the other suggestions should be helpful.
Disclaimer: I hate AI and wish it would go away.
Having said that, if a guy looks for help and can’t find it, the tool is there for him to make it himself.
I hate AI, and I’m not too fond of AI using, but I can’t fault someone who finds in it a tool to do what they want after trying other means.
Harrock, it’s not always easy to find artists like that for stuff that will happen, or might happen. Do you have stuff already made for them to illustrate? It might even help you get some attention if artists can see what it is they’d be putting their art to.
Unless you find, or are looking for, artists that work on comission and don’t mind as long as they get paid, in which case, you need to meet their price. But that doesn’t seem the sort of thing you’re looking for.
Everyone has made great points.
The reddit board that John linked is excellent. I am not sure how to validate authenticity of human art, but I like what I see and will try there.
I think we can close this topic because it’s turning into something else.
To clarify, indeed you didn’t, and I Ioved that you didn’t.
Hello. I do 3d renders of characters and scenes. It’s cheaper than drawn art, and there’s no AI. Not everyone likes the realistic render style though. However, I could do some stuff for free for you. Depending on what i have in my asset set.
Authoring > Looking for Collaborators is the correct place to request collaboration from artists here.
Hello. I do 3d renders of characters and scenes. It’s cheaper than drawn art, and there’s no AI. Not everyone likes the realistic render style though. However, I could do some stuff for free for you. Depending on what i have in my asset set.
Awesome I’d love to see what you have! Thank you!
DM me please I’ll send some game links
Hey, depending on what style you’re going for, I also do 2d art. But I’d need to know what the level of detail and style it is you have in mind, as I’d need to know whether I have time for it. Feel free to DM me, and if need be I can share some recent works I did.
For reference, recent sketches:
