It’s the perennial problem: You’re working on a homebrew work - as simple as an NPC or as involved as a whole sourcebook - and you can’t find artwork that really fits like you’d want. Since it’s not something that can be sold (like, say, the Genesys Foundry), sinking money into commissioning art isn’t necessarily realistic (especially for larger projects). But, at the same time, you know it’s a jerk move to ask artists to do the work “fOr ThE eXpOsUrE.”
So…what do you do? Do you make do with “good enough” (or worse) that you can find pre-existing? Or do you know/have an artist who likes playing in LFL’s IP sandbox for the fun of it, the same way you like putting together material in the IP for fun and provide you with art?
Yes, I get that. (Thought that was evident with that bit about people asking artists to work for free for so-called “exposure.”) At the same time, I was curious if anyone is lucky enough to personally have an artist friend/partner that works with them. Personally, I’d love to commission original art for my homebrew books, but it’s just not feasible to lay out hundreds for original art for a free homebrew book, so I settle for “close enough.”
When we’ve had visual artists in our group who were so inclined, they sometimes offer doodles to full blown art for the campaign. If our homebrew is just staying on the table and not being shared anywhere else in the world, we use what art we find for the purposes needed.
I usually settle for “good enough”. Though I have experience in GIMP so its not too much hassel to change things or create characters, just a time sink…
I have been drawing for over 20 years and it’s super difficult to do hand drawn tokens. I have resorted to using 3d characters - top down to represent my tokens. I use Daz3d, sketchfab, deviant art, adobe dimension, patreon to find all my tokens. I change them up in photoshop and add specifics, it’s working for us now. We have like 5k tokens from what we’ve been collecting. They are all static but I am digging in the video game modders community to see if I can make them slightly animated - Breathing, resting pose you see in games, etc.
I am in the process of working on a website to help out my rpg group. It’s very early right now but I have a cool galaxy map that you can use. I hope to add more content but have to be sure I give proper due.
I’m looking at my in-the-works conversion of Cracken’s Rebel Operatives, though, and wishing I either had an artist friend who dug doing homebrew for the game as much as me, or the budget necessary for all original art. Because a lot of the black and white line art for the original WEG version is…really rough. Yikes.
