TTRPG art on a shoestring budget

Here's a little general advice for indie game creators who can't afford all the art they want.

Stock art

If you have a little bit of money to use, stock art is cheaper than commissioned art and it's way easier to find what you need compared to trawling through commons (more on that later).

Understand and abide by licenses!

Artists license their art in different ways, with drastically different conditions. If all your art comes from one or two artists (or is all under particular licenses, like CC-BY), you'll save some headaches when it comes to complying with licensing terms and laying out credits.

An aside: I have found several pieces of licensed art where artists specify how they must be credited, and then the provided credit line has a spelling mistake or grammatical error. Should you fix it? I wouldn't personally risk it. I'm not a lawyer. I follow instructions.

I'm assuming you're not using AI material. Stock art creators are increasingly (and understandably) forbidding use of their work alongside it. Note that stock art websites don't do a very good job of tagging and filtering this stuff out!

• Some, like Adobe Stock, are moderately diligent for mediocre results: exclude generative AI from a search and maybe one will slip through in ten pages of results.
• Sites relying strictly on self-reporting, like Pixabay, are pretty much all saturated in untagged AI images. They've become practically unusable; you're basically reduced to searching in older time periods or within specific artists with a consistent, identifiable style.
• DriveThruRPG also relies mostly on self-reporting, but I haven't seen many AI images passing themselves off as handcrafted.
  

Stock art directly from the creator

If there's a specific look/type of art you want, Patreon is one of the better sources, because you can support currently-active artists on an individual basis and at reasonable prices. I can't speak to whether or not it's better for the actual artists (I know they hiked their cut a little while ago).
 

An aside for Patreon artists: Please provide something like an actual license! It doesn't have to be long or detailed. It just has to make me feel confident that I am permitted to use your work for commercial purposes, can or can't advertise with it, won't be infringing on your moral rights, etc.

Open-sourcing your game art

So, on to doing it yourself! Lots of indie game makers have achieved great results by sourcing, compositing, and laying out their own art. Expect it to take a lot of work.

You'll probably have looked into public domain art. Specifically, works that have lost copyright status due to the amount of time that has passed since the death of their creator. If someone tells you a hard and fast rule for establishing this, they are wrong!

• The "falls into PD" age differs between nations, there are all sorts of carve-outs, and even a photo reproduction may or may not be transformative. Don't rely on anyone but your lawyer for legal advice.
  

A lot of sites purport to collect and curate art "in the public domain". They almost always mean "in the public domain in the USA", and even if that's fine with you, they might be wrong, and even if they're right, they might not be conscientious. Check your sources!

Where can you get free-to-use art? Well, there's tons of places. Start with Wikimedia Commons, which is huge and usually quite accurately labelled with regards to sources and licensing (...but I have found errors before. Check your sources! Check your sources! Check your sources!).

Other sites for free art include: OpenGameArt, Pixabay, Pexels, Adobe Stock, various open clip art creators, and museums and libraries like The Met and the NYPL digital collections. All have their own foibles.

Understand that "free" doesn't mean "obligation-free".

I mentioned stock art licenses earlier. Learn what the various Creative Commons licenses do. CC0 (essentially a PD dedication) is the most generous, but fairly rare in the wild. As well as the license requirements, learn about and respect creators' moral rights. Credit people even when you're not required to by the license terms.

A lot of old PD art is unfortunately physically degraded. There are great pieces made unusable by age. Too bad. Don't waste time on things that are too small for your DPI, too faded or blurry, or too palimpsest'd. Understand that entropy is mostly irreversible. Or try tracing.

And know the value of your time. If you spent a hundred hours sorting through public domain art trying to find suitable works, and you didn't enjoy the process... would you have been better off just working for money and using that to pay an artist?

Good news

Anyone can be a competent collage artist by compositing, cropping, tweaking, and laying out PD / open license art. And digital tools stratospherically expand what the word 'collage' means. Have fun testing things!

The more you try things out, the more neat combinations you'll find. Sometimes even a very simple effect can make a serviceable piece of art out of something stylistically inappropriate.

For example, I had this old black-and-white John Batten illustration saved:

 

I wanted to use it as the Nuckelavee demon in my current monster compendium (https://bit.ly/ancblasph). But it's a bit cartoonish, there's no colour to make it pop, and the solid white won't work against my backgrounds. It only takes six or seven trivial image operations to get something a bit more atmospheric:

I'm not much of an artist, but if I spent a bit more time on it, I could use more masks and curves and things to make this into a really crisp, vibrant piece.

Software

What tools should you use for image editing? I love FOSS in principle, and the people striving to make it work, but you do tend to get more or less what you pay for.

GIMP is perhaps your best free option, but it lags behind Affinity Photo (having no proper CMYK support, for example). APhoto in turn is cheaper than Photoshop, but lacks a few of its features.

You can do pretty much everything in a suite like Affinity Photo or Photoshop. But there are specialist tools for TTRPG-specific things (hexographer, inkarnate, etc), and their narrow focus may make them easier and more convenient than doing the same thing in an image editor.

Using these tools

What do you need to learn? I would say the ten basic concepts to familiarise yourself with are:

• colour level/curve manipulation
• selections
• non-destructive editing
• filters/adjustments
• brush tools
• geometry tools
• perspective tools
• touch-up tools
• layers and layer modes
• masks and clipping

There's plenty more, of course.

What do you need in terms of meta-level knowledge? Mainly, where to go for help. The internet is awash with tutorials. Start by reading/watching one of those, and then turn to searching/asking in the forums for your software.

Concluding thoughts

I started this by addressing those "who can't afford all the art they want". Again, don't forget that your time on Earth has value. If you have some exact image in mind, and it takes you 50 hours to assemble a pretty good version of it from diverse sources and painstaking image manipulations... then maybe you were better off paying an artist.

Except.

You're gaining skills as you go, and that alone may be worth it in the end. You're trying new things and making stuff.

Assembling other people's work in new ways is itself an art form, and constructing things from publicly available works may lead you to explore other ways to create.

There are side benefits, too.

Once you have the basics down, you can make your life easier by using your image manipulation tools to do mockups and visualisations. For example, I spent ten minutes this morning pairing up different candidate typefaces against different grungy/distressed visual styles in a scratch-built design, as in this snapshot:

Art, like everything in life, is a learning process. You'll find that you can cut some corners and not others.

And finally, if none of the above works for you, you could always Learn To Do Art Using Raw Materials yourself. I hear it can be very rewarding!