Table of Contents
Links (Updated May 2024)
Below are a list of links that supplement this article with their own advice and resources. Check ‘em out!
Exuent Omnes / Skeleton Code Machine
Rabbits & Demons: Hand-drawn tracings of public domain woodcuts from the 16th through 18th centuries.
Hey there,
This week’s newsletter we’re going to be discussing something that a lot of folks might find useful going into ZineQuest, make100, and other indie-focused crowdfunding events: free art, meaning, art that you can use for your projects that was already created and exists for that purpose that costs nothing (and isn’t illegal or unethical to use).
Introduction
I’ve seen a lot of information out there about how to source art, where to find it, how to attribute the artists, etc. This post intends to answer almost every question you’ve had on the subject so that you can add really appealing art that is (a) free and (b) actually good.
An aside: If you’re one of the artists who made one of the five pieces of art every adventure on the DMs Guild seems to use, this is not meant to be disparaging to you in any way, shape, or form. I hope its clear I mean no ill will to many of the fantastic artists out there who have dedicated their craft to creating cost-effective art for the community at large. This is meant to be a different angle and aims to help people find art that is unique and a little off the beaten path.
Here’s the general rundown of what we’ll be talking about:
Terminology and legality around sourcing art.
Basic and advanced techniques for sourcing art.
Evaluating the quality of sourced art.
Augmenting or changing art for your needs.
The pros and cons of using AI art, and why it isn’t free art.
The top 6 FAQs about free art.
With that being said, what are we not going to be talking about? We won’t be discussing how to create original artwork from scratch, detailed technical aspects of illustration or photography, comparative analysis of the various different sites of sourcing stock art, or any biographical / ethical discussion on any artists themselves. We’re also not going to be discussing paid stock art, which is its own massive industry.
Why? Because everything I’m about to tell you applies to paid stock art as well—you just also have to pay for it. Since I don’t go that route (if I’m paying for art, I’d rather pay for art that’s specific to my project) I’m not going to talk about it.
A Quick Word About Legality
Obviously, I’m not a lawyer so everything you read here you should absolutely verify yourself and assess whether you’re in the clear before you start just plucking images off the internet. Nothing you read here is falsified or purposefully untrue—I’m absolutely trying to make sure my research is as honest and clear as possible—but things change and what you might read today might not be true next year (or even next week).
So, again, I’m not a lawyer.
Some Terminology
The long and short of it is as follows:
Stock art consists of pieces that “… are generic photos, illustrations and icons created without a particular project in mind. They are then licensed, usually for a fee, to individuals or organizations for use in marketing materials, websites, packaging, book covers and more”. Note the word usually in that sentence.
It is important to note that 99% of the time, stock art is licensed and has a copyright.
Public domain art consists of art that has either fallen out of copyright or never had it to begin with and you’re able to do virtually whatever you want with it. There is usually some sort of notice with the art that specifies to what degree attribution (when you have to call out the artist in your usage) is required.
For example, with the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license, there are no conditions with which you need to fulfill to “distribute, remix, adapt, and/or build upon in any medium or format”.
Royalty-Free means the art requires a one-time payment, and then it can be used multiple times without paying additional fees. This is different from completely free art (and as such we won’t go into it here) but it's worth mentioning as you’ll see that term floating around in some places. Royalty-free art, like the more general stock art, is typically licensed and copyrighted.
Creative Commons Licenses
There are multiple types of Creative Commons Licenses, which are public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted work. Aside from CC0 (mentioned above in Public domain art), there are six different types of Creative Commons licenses, each with its own conditions:
CC BY allows for you to “distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format, so long as attribution is given to the creator”1. You can use this license for commercial materials (ie, games you want to sell).
CC BY-SA allows for the same as CC BY, but if you remix, adapt, or build upon the material, you must use the same CC BY-SA license for the modified material as with the original. The license also allows for commercial use.
CC BY-NC is the same as CC BY, but it is noncommercial—meaning you cannot sell the material you’re making nor can the work be intended to earn a profit commercially.
CC BY-NC-SA is the same as CC BY-SA—its just the noncommercial version.
CC BY-ND allows for commercial use of the material, but it must be the original, unadapted work. It cannot be altered in any way—meaning you can’t fix up some things in Photoshop or change the colors (or really anything I’m going to show you how to do in this article).
CC BY-NC-ND is the same as CC BY-ND—its just the noncommercial version.
In certain circumstances you’ll notice numbers after the license code (ex, CC BY 4.0). This just means its the 4th version of the license. The Creative Commons organization makes iterative improvements to their licenses, meaning that 4.0 is strictly improved over 3.0 (it’s not like DND where 5th Edition does not explicitly represent an improvement over 3rd Edition).2
Sourcing Art: The Basics
There are a number of places you can find really high-quality images to use in your works. A lot of them will be more fitting for background art or for us to alter heavily (more on that later) but its important to note that there are some diamonds in the rough.
Here are a handful of options:
Wikimedia Commons. This is the daddy of freely usable images, videos, and other media on the internet. With over 100 million individual media files, it has a ton of content. There are some cons to it (licensing can be a little bit of a headache sometimes, image quality is all over the board, etc) but it’s a great place to look if you’re wanting something really specific. For example, you can search artwork made during a specific century in a specific region of a specific country.
Pixabay / Pexels / Unsplash: These are all sort of the same site in my eyes. Certainly there are some minor differences—I’ve personally found Unsplash to have a little more experimental stuff than the other two—but you really can’t go wrong with choosing one over another. One kind of irritating thing about these sites is they are constantly trying to either advertise their subscription models or pushing stuff from iStock and other paid sites to the front. Just something to be aware of.
KaboomPics: This is a relatively newer site (for me, at least) that definitely skews more towards lifestyle photography but two things I really like about it are that 1) each photo is part of a larger photoshoot and 2) each photo has a six-color palette that goes with it, complete with actual click-to-copy hex codes.
There are, of course, like a hundred other sites you can use aside from these five, but I focused on these because for many of them CC0 is the default license with a few exceptions (KaboomPics has its own “might as well be CC0” license, for example).
Like I said above, most of these images are going to be… we’ll say sanitized. You’re not likely to find a picture of a goblin that would go perfect in your bestiary, nor a great picture of a monk that isn’t problematic. But modern-day and futuristic ttRPGs could seriously benefit from some of the images here. At the very least, these work great for background textures, creative crops, or just getting poses that you can augment from.
Sometimes its just fun to look for inspiration on some of these sites; while writing this article I was copying the KaboomPics link to use and found a really nice color palette I might use in a future project. Can’t copyright that!
Sourcing Art: Advanced Tips
Did you know that the digital repositories of museums often have a section of their catalogue that is open access? And did you know that each has thousands upon thousands of actual, real-world art that is perfect for all kinds of genres (especially fantasy medieval-styled games)?
Ignoring the fact that many of these pieces of art just work right outside of the box, you can obviously also edit them with color, add your own characters to them collage-style, or do really any other sort of remixing you’d like.
I really enjoy this method as it feels good to make something inspired by history—if you can use actual historic artwork as well, it makes it just that much cooler. There’s a nice throughline that feels very human when you’re taking 400 year old art and finding ways to use it in your own work. You’ll very likely find artists you’d never heard of before and mediums you ordinarily wouldn’t have considered to use.
Here are two museum catalogues of note:
The Met: The Metropolitan Museum of Art has a wonderful collection of photography, etchings, drawings, sculpture, you name it. This is usually my first stop when I’m looking for interesting artwork that helps get my project’s message across. You’ll want to play around with the filters to get exactly what you want, but my recommendation would be to start with drawings, etchings, or paintings.
Smithsonian: With a whopping ~5 million artifacts to explore, the Smithsonian has the largest swath of content by far among the digital museum collections. However, it is also highly variable in quality and ability to actually find what you want. It took a little getting used to their interface before I fully felt comfortable with it, but now I use it more for just browsing and letting something jump out at me as I explore.
Like everything else, it’s important to make sure the works you’re using have the license you’re expecting or working with. While both of these links go to the “Open Access” filtered search, some may have special circumstances around attribution or other things to keep in mind.
You’re about halfway done with the article!
Have you enjoyed it so far? Would you like me to do more primers in the future on other aspects of ttRPG production? If you could go ahead and let me know via the poll below, I’d appreciate it.
Evaluating the Quality of Sourced Art
Many people (myself included) evaluate a work based not just on how it plays, but how it looks.3 While art is absolutely not necessary to get your work out there, it can definitely have an effect on how people perceive the work.
When selecting art for your project, you should make sure you’re not just looking to fill your book with pictures. Here’s what you should keep an eye on:
Project Fit: The art should match your project’s theme. When you have art that doesn’t match the theme of the project, you can create dissonance. I think everyone can remember a time where you looked at art in a book and thought “Something weird about that”—that’s because it didn’t match the theme.
Visual Quality: The actual physical quality of the art (pixels count, visual clarity, etc) is the second-most important factor after finding art that matches the theme. In case you didn’t know, if you’re only doing digital files for your project, you can get away with doing slightly lower quality art.4
Originality: As mentioned in the introduction, you want to try and find art that isn’t being used elsewhere. I can guarantee you that by using fantasy-styled art found on DMs Guild—despite its quality and better immediate fit—is being used in many different products as you read this. Go for things that cause the reader to wonder and imagine.
Legal Use: Make sure you’re in the clear legally. This means checking copyright status, adhering to license conditions, and proper attribution if needed. If you need a refresher, check the Creative Commons discussion above and check out this fantastic video by Emma Colbert on YouTube.
Cohesiveness: Not only should the art in your projects be visually in line with theme, they should also be in line with each other. This doesn’t mean you need to have every piece of art be by the same artist (though that is an easy way to make sure it’s cohesive)—just make sure the art works together as a single idea. A pro tip, albeit a bit silly, is to literally print out your art, put it on your wall in a grid, stand back about 5 feet, and squint; if anything immediately jumps out at you, it probably isn’t as cohesive as you’d want.
Not that it happens every time, but in some cases art can make or break your project. If you do choose to use art, make sure it’s cohesive, original, and legally sound.
If you’re in a situation where you can’t do that, you’re better off with no art—which is okay. Many, many, many great games have only a few pieces of art or no art at all in them, like Whitehack, Knave 1E, Maze Rats, Blades in the Dark, the previously mentioned Wolves Upon The Coast, etc. In a lot of cases, having text that is easy to read and evocative is far more important than artwork.
Augmenting Art For Your Needs
Rarely will you find work that fits as-is into your project. A lot of the time, you’ll need to do some tweaking to the art via filters, color correction, collaging with other images, or even fully draw over it in an image manipulation program like Adobe Illustrator or Affinity Designer.
Here’s how you can adapt and modify art to meet your unique needs:
Tailoring to Fit: This might mean cropping for emphasis, adjusting colors to match your palette, or even overlaying text. The goal is to make the art serve your project's narrative and aesthetic, and sometimes the simplest option is best. Even having all the imagery follow a similar color palette (that maybe you stole from KaboomPics, I don’t know, I’m not your dad) can make a project feel cohesive.
Decide on Integrity: When you’re using art in your work, you’ll need to decide how far you want to go with it. In some cases, throwing some text over it keeps the original integrity of the image. In other cases, you might want to throw the whole thing into Image Trace in Illustrator and tweak the individual path nodes. In either case, deciding how much you want to alter the art is an important step in the process and should be decided when placing your art in your work.
Technical Considerations: You don’t have to be a graphic designer or artist to create interesting and evocative imagery that reinforces your projects themes. Cropping, adjusting brightness and contrast, and applying simple filters can go a long way. Just make sure that whatever you do, don’t blow out your image with filters and adjustments—many of the changes listed above are destructive, meaning they remove pixels with each applied edit that you’ll need to undo to get back.
Contextual Adaptation: Don’t forget either the power of a good collage. Sometimes you’ll want to use multiple images for a singular section of your project—that’s okay! Just make sure they work together to tell the story you’re trying to tell. Play around with images going off the pages or connecting across the gutter (the inner spine of a book).
Legal Considerations: Always keep an eye on the legal side of things. Ensure that your modifications are permissible under the art's licensing terms. Some licenses may restrict alterations or commercial use, so verify these details beforehand.
The Pros and Cons of Using AI Art (and Why It Isn’t Free Art)
The elephant in the room for nearly all ttRPG writers over the past few years: should you or should you not use AI in your projects?
Let me be clear up front and say, unequivocally, I do not think you should use AI art in any project you intend to sell.
Why? Because the technology is too new, too fraught with intense existential discussions, and, frankly, doesn’t have a clear-cut answer to the legality of it. I’m not saying you’ll get sued by using AI art, but its a very hot topic right now and it WILL turn certain potential customers off immediately.
Not to mention that you kind of don’t need it… like at all? Especially with the success of the projects I listed in the section on art quality that get away with using practically no art (Knave 1E, as mentioned before, has little to no artwork in it. The success it garnered led to Knave 2E, which went on to make $600K+). The simple fact of the matter is that you do not need art to make your project—let alone AI art.
If you’re still thinking “Yes, but technology is just going to keep improving” or “Artists need to get with the times and stop being luddites” or any other dismissive reaction to me saying don’t use AI art, let’s put it another way:
I don’t know anybody who is actively looking for projects that use AI art—but I can find a whole hell of a lot of people who will immediately unfollow a project that is. Can you afford to lose the clearly bigger group?
I’m genuinely interested in what your take on AI art is—so please leave a comment and let me know how you’ve handled it. Even if its completely disagreeing or agreeing with me.
The Top 6 FAQs about Sourced Art
Here are some of the biggest questions I’ve seen when researching this topic. I obviously can’t cover everything anyone could ever ask, so if I didn’t answer a question you’ve got, let me know in the comments.
Why can't I just use any image I find on the internet for my project?
Well, first of all its illegal. And unethical. Taking art off of google images and just using it with no care in the world isn’t that much different than just taking a book off the bookstore shelf and walking out with it without paying for it. Its theft, plain and simple—which is what makes the AI art discussion so complex.
What does 'free art' mean, and where can I find it?
As mentioned above, free art can mean one of two things typically: royalty-free or public domain. Public domain art is entirely free and you do not need to typically worry about a license as it isn’t copyrighted at all. Royalty free art may not cost you money, but it typically does have a license that goes along with it.
What is copyright, and how does it apply to art?
Like I said 3,000 words ago—I’m not a lawyer, so take what I say with a grain of salt. Copyright ensures your art, media, or otherwise copywriteable work is legally protected from someone else stealing it and calling it theirs. There are many different licenses that protect yours and other works to varying degrees, so you will want to read the uppermost section of this article and do a bit of extra reading on your own if copyright is still a little confusing.
What is attribution, and why do I have to do it?
Depending on the license, you may have to do it because the license specifically requires it for you to use the art. In other cases, it’s not necessary to attribute the artist but it’s one of those ethical things that keeps the hobby a friendly, collaborative place. Referencing other creatives is a good way to ensure other artists will want to work with you in the future.
Can I use free art for anything, like my business logo or merchandise?
Sometimes. You will need to read the license of the work you’re using very closely to ensure there aren’t any clauses that prevent you from doing so. If its public domain, you generally don’t have to worry about this.
What should I do if I can't find the source or artist of an image I want to use?
Honestly, don’t use the art. It’s not worth the anxiety and potential hassle if it turns out you used it illegally. If you think a certain piece of art is the make or break for your work, you’re almost certainly wrong.
Wrap Up
Well this ended up being a lot longer than I thought it would be and took me two more days than I had anticipated. I even had a poll in there.
I hope this has helped you understand a bit more about sourcing art for your projects in a way that is unique, fun, and legally sound. Since this is already 4000+ words, I’ll probably be updating this article over the course of the year with comments and feedback from folks, so consider this more of a living document. That’s why there aren’t any ads or anything, aside from begging you to subscribe to my newsletter.
I’m not too proud to beg: subscribe today! Please!
Otherwise, if there’s anything you think I missed or would like further clarification on, let me know in the comments below.
For the unfamiliar, attribution means somewhere in your work you need to call out the original creator of the material. This is usually done in the credits page or on the title page, but can be found elsewhere.
One extremely important thing to note about using creative commons is that you may find yourself in a situation where you are putting your work (whether it be a rulebook, supplement, setting guide, etc) into a 4.0 license but you’re using art that has a 3.0 license. You must clearly indicate BOTH licenses in your credits page. Despite 4.0 being a strict upgrade to 3.0, they’re still separate licenses and by omitting one you may be opening the door for potential legal issues down the line.
Then again, good work doesn’t need art as long as people know its good. When you’re first starting out, you want to make a good impression—really evocative prose and highly functional rules that are easy to read can far outweigh good art. A perfect example of this is Luke Gearing’s “Wolves Upon the Coast”, which has next to no art aside from a handful of hex maps made using the classic hex style that has become the norm.
Note that I said SLIGHTLY worse quality. You still want to have good quality, you just don’t have to have the best. Ideally, you’d have something in the 100-150 ppi range for digital PDFs and no less than 300 dpi for physically printed books. If you don’t think it matters, you’re wrong—people notice that sort of thing and when they do, they automatically wonder why you didn’t notice it. Here’s a good article that discusses the differences between DPI and PPI.
Fantastic post and a great alternative to AI art!