How to find artists for a space opera gaming supplement for charity? [closed]

Question

Some friends and I wrote a space opera genre book for Solar System. Normally, this is something we'd release out into the wild and put a Creative Commons license on it. However, for a variety of reasons, we want to turn it into an actual book, instead, and sell it, with all (and I do mean all) the proceeds going to charity.

In order to do that, I'd like to find a person or a couple of people, who would be willing to create and/or donate art for a charity project.

Any advice on how I might find such a person?

(In case it matters, we're letting the artist(s) retain copyrights and ownership of the art. All we need is the license to use it in this particular project. We'll even take previously published work too, as long as it still belongs to the author.)

Answer 1

This is a networking and marketing task, at its heart. You have to find people who are interested, who you're also interested in, and casting a wide net is the most effective way to collect that many impressions in a reasonable amount of time. Still, it does take some time.

You also have to pitch your project in an accessible way while also providing enough information to satisfy the curiosity of people who are drawn in by the initial pitch. You have to sell the idea of your project, and make it and your team an attractive opportunity to the right people.

1. Put out the message on your social networks: Twitter, Facebook, blog, and what-have-you. "Looking for artists for a charity project!" Talk up the project, show your enthusiasm. At all costs avoid just posting the same message every day, since that just makes people wonder why there isn't more substance. Give curious people something to read if they decide to dig deeper to see what else you've said about the project. Some of those people will decide to contact you, or will pass the information on to artist friends or networks where artists will see it.

2. Find artists whose work you like. Browse through DeviantArt and find artists whose style would complement the text, regardless of whether they have sci-fi genre art in their portfolio. Contact them, but expect some kind of rejection from most inquiries – good artists are busy people and the ones I've known usually have enough projects on their plate that they should reject interesting new projects in order to make good on their existing commitments. You wouldn't want a too-busy artist to say "yes" anyway – you'd just be signing up for delays while they juggle their workload.

   Give a cheerful "Thank you for the response!" even if they're less than kind, because being rude to one artist can easily make a name for yourself as someone to not work with. You're looking for the interested responses, not aiming to verbally joust with a cranky illustrator who might have read their email before they had their coffee.

   If you ask ten artists (in a personal, non-spammy way), you might get one who's interested enough to ask you more about the project.

A few weeks of that should give you a handful of interested contacts.