Hello.
I’m working on a game for some time now, and I’m constantly looking for artists as I’m not so good with graphics. I mean I ask around, everyone who might be art related, post on game forums and such… one person answered and he was 15 
… Where do you guys get your artists? As my goal is to make games for living, I can’t do it without them Learning graphics and to program at the same time would be overkill I think.
Make an incredible demo with average art, which will probably attract an artist that thinks he can do better, or who wants to improve your game.
In general artists won’t look for you because you have a incredibly smart engine, or unheard of features…
I think artists are more visually orientated, so you just need to give them what they are interested in: something visually promising, that just need that extra touch.
http://forums.indiegamer.com/ is a nice place to find artists (those who make a living of it), provided you have enough money for the work.
Lilian
It is my experience that finding good artists to work on hobby games projects is next to impossible.
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Most artists have no idea just how much work is involved with even a simple game. They’ll have drawn a few sprites or created a few models before, but as soon as you ask them to do something simple like animate a character for a platformer they’ll draw you three completely different frames (probably in different colours and sizes) and give up.
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Most artists willing to work for free are very limited. The classic example of this is their ‘portfolio’ consisting of untextured models which look pretty cool because they’re rendered using the funky radiocity settings in their modeler. They can barely uv map, their texturing will be terrible and rigging and animating will be completely beyond them (worse, they’ll claim that it’s “not what they do” and refuse to even give it a try. When you do it manually yourself they’ll claim that you’ve ruined their ‘beautiful’ work). Due to their limited skills, if you ever get a decent amout of work out of them it’ll all be in different styles and in different palettes, and your game will look worse than if you’d done consistant but crappy programmer art.
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If you’re lucky to find someone who’s artistically pretty good, their technical skills will be completely abysmal. They’ll give you tiles of all different sizes, tile ‘sheets’ where the tiles are placed arbitrarily and at random alignments all over a big (mostly empty) image and expect you to cut them out yourself (worse, this layout will change every time, without rhyme or reason). They’ll give you pixel art saved as massivly compressed jpgs, and animation sequences where the characters are in arbitrary and different positions within each image (and the filenames will be completely nonsensical, like “jump1”, “jumpHigh”, “jump4_copy”, “topLeapAnim”, “fallingFrameTwelve”). These too will change arbitrarily and nonsensically, and you’ll be expected to make it work.
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Theres a whole lot of ‘artists’ trying to make money off this in their spare time, despite the fact that they’ll fall firmly into catergory 1 and 2.
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If you ever find some one who doesn’t fall into one or more of the above catergories, odds are they’re already working somewhere good and don’t have the spare time. If they do work on art in their own time, it’ll be personal stuff and usually done in more traditional media (sculpture, painting, etc.).
The few good artists I’ve seen in hobby/personal game stuff are the artist-programmer or programmer-artist who is good enough to do the whole thing himself, or the two (occasionally three) person teams which formed because everybody already knew each other socially due to entirely unrelated reasons.
nicely explained orangy
unfortunately you’re right, it all comes to doing it yourself or searching for a friend (of a friend (of a friend…)) who knows how to draw and ask him to join your little project in hope you (the team) get popular because of it
I can do static 3d models and textures good enough to be presentable. Right now i’m learning how to program skeleton animations and how to model animated models. I had to learn both how to model and how to program by necessity and for similar reasons as the one presented above. I could do some static models for you and later the animated models in a way that is suitable for a computer as i did this before but you would have to help me by joining one of my indie projects and do some stuff for me, mostly related to converting game data in old binary formats to xml and getting a minimal prototype done. Besides i don’t do this in full time because i’m a univ student of computer science. If are interested in help me i can do the models you want.
There’s one kind of artistic competence you can ask for that is very helpful. Having a good amount of concept art before asking for modeling help, is essential, if your game is an original game and not a remake for example. That’s something i’m not very good at, unfortunately because i only make game remakes for fun and there’s plenty of concept art already for the games i’m trying to remake.
thank you zingbat for the offer but for now I just need a 2d artist (I think)… still learning how to make games. I think I would be able to learn enough graphics to do presentable models anyway.
Games are all about the art; the models, textures, sound…etc.
If you don’t have that, you don’t have anything to show.
Orangy Tangy is very right.
Not that I want to repeat what others have already said but Orangy Tang is sadly and horribly right! :-[ I’ve exactly experienced all he explained in my previous 2D game. Having said that, I still believe their’s hope even if you don’t have money to pay an artist (and we still haven’t talked about music and sound!). Like Kova said, I believe that if you reused really good graphics (and you can twist them in Photoshop) in your some sort of demo and the gameplay is really solid, then your chances of attracting an artist is really higher. It’s sad to say that but in this world everybody seem to believe by graphics only when they see a game for the first time. I’ve read a really interesting article lately which stress that very well: http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20070212/garneau_01.shtml
In general, I’ve given up on “people helping me with my game”. Why the heck would they? It’s your game, not theirs, so it’s your problem, not theirs.
The only ones willing to volunteer are the ones that are least skilled and have the least idea what they’re joining up for. Have no idea what 3D modeling is, can barely use Photoshop, are about 14-17 years old, have no discipline or dedication and give up within 2 weeks of joining, not realizing how much work was involved in creating a small game.
I’ve learned from experience that the only one that can create your game is yourself. The only thing you need to do is to keep the project REALISTIC and REASONABLE. Don’t make the game too big you won’t even get past designing a framework for it, let alone the graphics. Simple simple simple games. Don’t bury yourself in unrealistic dreams.
I think most in here can create a superb game that can compete with most of the games coming out of multi-million-dollar studio projects. Given that you stop time for about 10-20 years, and you won’t age.
The challenge is to do only small games with superb gameplay. Don’t waste your time. - Just my five cents.
This cannot be more true appel!
But it sorta sucks using some generic free stuff doesn’t it…
Cas