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Placeholder Art Sources

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ruy343
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Joined: 07/03/2013

Hey all,

After I get a few more playtests under my belt with blank cards made with excel, I will need to get some placeholder art to give the game a bit more flavor. Last time I did this, I spent weeks learning how to use image editing software, and produced OK results, but ultimately the game didn't work out.

To save myself time, and allow myself to focus my efforts on the game rather than the art, I'd like to ask: where are your favorite places to look for simple images for placeholder art?

questccg
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Generic image

And not IMAGE(S). What I mean by this is to find ONE (1) suitable image and use that on all the cards. Let's face it, even IF you find placeholder artwork for all your cards, there is no way it's all going to look cohesive.

Take for example my SPACE game: I use a picture of some stars. And put that on every card that did not have a FINISHED piece of artwork.

But since I wanted PRELIMINARY artwork, I invested in $1,000 worth of it to demonstrate what the final product would look like.

I see people using all kinds of placeholder artwork and I CRINGE... Often it just looks BAD.

So I would advise to keep it to one placeholder image and invest in some preliminary artwork to try to SELL your game.

Just my 2 cents.

Think THEME: if your game is about farming, put a farm. If your game is about Dragons, find one (1) cool dragon and put it on the cards without artwork... Something cohesive like that. Very few games look appealing with placeholder artwork - and you don't want people to get confused like: "Is this what the FINAL artwork will look like?" Know what I mean?

gxnpt
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Joined: 12/22/2015
images

If you are just trying to make it more appealing to playtesters - so image source does not matter - all you need to do is crop or resize anything somewhat representative.

And crop and resize are the most basic functions of any picture editor.

Fhizban
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check sites like freepic or

check sites like freepic or iconarchive - there are tons of free clipart sites on the net. only downside is that they provide the images at 72dpi not 300dpi - but for a quick test mockup this should not be a problem.

I wonder if the art my be used commercially, but at least no one will sue you if you use it and show it around to a crowd of people.

use the search functions of sites: if you are doing a helloween game, search for witches, pumpkins and candies etc. they usually come up with very basic "everyday" artworks, but that should do the trick for now.

let-off studios
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Pre-Fab Shapes

A lot of image editors have pre-set shapes you can draw on your own: rectangles, ellipses, triangles, stars, etc. Those are usually enough to deliver your point, and look much nicer than a freehand drawing, in most cases.

I use both MS Paint and Photoshop CS2, and both of them have "shape stamps" for a wide variety of shapes.

polyobsessive
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Placeholder art

I tend to find that if I want placeholder art, I can often find something usable on pixabay.com. Combine that with the icons on game-icons.net and thenounproject.com and I'm usually pretty much set. I have one game (currently on a back-burner) where pretty much all the art is old engravings/copperplate sourced from old books on gutenberg.org, which has some fantastic stuff, but isn't really set up for image searching.

As for the comment about prototypes with bad art; it all depends on where you are going with a project. I'd tend to just use any old thing to start with (it really doesn't matter if it looks shonky to start) and then gradually improve the presentation if the game warrants it. But then, I have no intention of ever doing self-publishing (other than as free PnP) so artwork is not my highest priority.

radioactivemouse
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I myself am an artist...

...but as rule of thumb, I don't put art in prototypes unless I've secured an artist.

It's like a cake. Ultimately, I'd want it to look pretty, but I want to make sure that the cake itself is good, the frosting and decorations should be the topper, not the substance.

If a game can give the feel of the theme without art, then you should add the art. It's more challenging, but to me it's worth it in the end.

Fhizban
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contrary to what

contrary to what @radioactivemouse said (while I understand and honor your statement) - art is to me part of the core design.

I usually get bored when my prototypes dont look pretty. and in fact, artwork is to me - and yes, this is a rather obscure point of view - part of the mechanics itself. a good looking game sets itself apart so much compared to a bad looking one and it is connected strongly to the overall look and feel of a game.

this even goes as far, as i try to incorporate art ASAP into the games design, as later on it just feels tacked on and not right (im not a big fan of re-themes or applying a theme afterwards as you might have guessed).

of course, nothing excuses bad mechanics - but good art, adds this extra layer of goodness.

radioactivemouse
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Understood.

Fhizban wrote:
contrary to what @radioactivemouse said (while I understand and honor your statement) - art is to me part of the core design.

I usually get bored when my prototypes dont look pretty. and in fact, artwork is to me - and yes, this is a rather obscure point of view - part of the mechanics itself. a good looking game sets itself apart so much compared to a bad looking one and it is connected strongly to the overall look and feel of a game.

this even goes as far, as i try to incorporate art ASAP into the games design, as later on it just feels tacked on and not right (im not a big fan of re-themes or applying a theme afterwards as you might have guessed).

of course, nothing excuses bad mechanics - but good art, adds this extra layer of goodness.

We agree for the most part. In my experience, art can always change; artists can back out of a project, publishers will assign an artist if they pick up your game, anything can and will happen.

By not putting in art (in prototypes), it challenges the designer to concentrate on theme and gameplay in the mechanics instead of the art. But I know that people will have differing opinions, so I'm not really trying to change people's minds...I'm only here to offer my opinions based on my experiences.

So yea, no argument here, glad to hear more perspectives on this.

gilamonster
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Joined: 08/21/2015
open-source sources

There are a lot of open-source computer games with artwork that is good enough for a prototype; just check the terms of the license under which the artwork falls (which will sometimes be a little different to the software license). For instance, if it is under the CC-BY-SA license, then the artwork may be reused and modified, but the original creators must be attributed, and your version of the artwork -though not the game itself- must be released under a similar license (so it is not really an issue for a private-use prototype not intended for distribution).

Old illustrated books that have passed into the public domain (eg on Project Gutenberg) can also yield good artwork - I think there's at least one fairly well-known game designer who releases print-and-play games using art from this or similar sources.

Also, the well-known open-source image editor called "the gimp" has some tools which allow generation of certain types of art with almost no effort - for instance there is a random map generator or a library of textures that can be used to produce planets for a space-themed game with only a few seconds of effort; also drop-in flares for stars. It also has some special brush tools which create an image with one click (leaves, stars, explosions, vegetables and various other things). A little more effort than clip-art, but really only a little. Other graphics software might be even better at this; I just mention it in particular because I'm quite familiar with it.

Finally, looking forward (and applying the open-source principle, which I strongly approve of), there is nothing to stop anyone willing here from collaboratively putting together a collection of freely available self-made artwork and component templates for anyone to use for prototyping purposes. I'd contribute to it, of course.

Corsaire
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Joined: 06/27/2013
Transforming Pictures

I like using artistic effects in paint or photo programs to create illustration-like art from photos.

Some of the effects have names like:
Posterize, Water Color, convert to line art, Cutout, Color pencil

You can use your own photos to source these like of friends or objects around the house or maybe old toys.

Also, browse around government websites, as at least in the US, government produced works are public domain.

And here is a website of a public domain clipart site:
http://www.wpclipart.com/

whiletruefork
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Joined: 04/28/2016
textures.com

I'm a huge fan of textures.com – obviously it's not going to work for specific graphics like objects or people or the like, but it's dirt easy to grab some decent textures from the site for card backs or backgrounds or to put underneath a black line drawing map, to give a little depth to the prototype. There are plenty of situations where having useful backgrounds can be a differentiator, too (for example, a "desert infantry" vs "mountain infantry" could be the same stock graphic with sandy stone backgrounds on the first and a craggy rock on the second).

If you use a LOT of natural textures of contrasting colors though, they can be pretty jarring, so I usually slap a gray layer on top of the base texture and then tweak the opacity so that the texture comes through as (for example) grass without being punch-in-the-face green grass.

Hook
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Plceholder art - wiki commons

I just saw a kickstarter game called "AVE ROMA" or something.. They use art from WIKI commons on all their cards. Art that is so old that you may use it however you want. This can be useful to some type of historic games.

For your own prototypes I gues you could use anything? Like images from Artstation or Deviantart...

stevebarkeruk
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I'm definitely in favour of

I'm definitely in favour of using varied placeholder art. Even if it's inconsistent or poor quality, one of the functions of art is to make cards and other components easily recognisable from across a table; playtesters being able to recognise a card at a distance by a simple image is easier than having to keep picking up every card to check the text.

As others have suggested, just use open source/free clip art, there's plenty out there.

djayshaggy
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Joined: 04/21/2016
I just type into my browser

I just type into my browser "Cartoon Ninja", and search through the images, filtering by size (usually a little larger than I need as scaling down looks better than scaling up) until I find something I like. If you use the work icon in your search, you'll get a lot of alpha images, which is a lot easier than trying to delete backgrounds. Of course, no matter what you type in, Bing images has a "Transparent" filter, which will only return images with alpha.

Squinshee
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Joined: 10/17/2012
Ditto above reply. I design

Ditto above reply. I design the card first (name, stats, etc.) then find an image online that's in the ballpark. I couldn't imagine designing the other way around, but I'm more of a mechanics guy than a theme guy. Also, I make sure each picture I find is tonally, thematically, and artistically similar to everything else I've chosen. I find prototypes with clashing art styles to be more distracting than ones without any art.

Gabe
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Joined: 09/11/2014
Here's my master list of
Tedthebug
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Joined: 01/17/2016
Another site

Www.opengameart.org is for digital gaming but they have some (a lot of space ships) 2d art that is free. Some of the artists can be contacted & are occasionally willing to make more in the same style as the other stuff they put up.
Www.opengameart.org

I used to use another site for textures, again it's for 3D stuff but works just as well for 2d. From memory it was
Www.cgtextures.com

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