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I'm working on a series of NPC cards but I'm having trouble finding good pictures. Is there a good source for public domain/creative commons fantasy-themed art out there? Is there another good way to get art other than Google Images?

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5 Answers

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You can do a search on deviant art for creative commons art work. The quality will vary though.

EDIT: You could also search flickr. if you got o flickr then click search -> advanced search then in there type what ever you are looking for (elf in the example link below), rather you want photo's or drawn art and click the creative common's check box.

Example looking for elf, photo's only, Illustration/Art / Animation/CGI, and creative commons only.

Google's Image search also works really well, I searched for creative commons fantasy art and got back a large number of hits.

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Are there good ways to search on deviant art? Is it keyword driven? – anon186 Sep 20 '10 at 18:39
Search for creative commons <searchterm>. For example I searched for creative commons knight and creative commons wizard and a bunch of results were returned of varying quality/usefulness. – Shawn Campbell Sep 21 '10 at 14:53
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CC licensed stuff is great, but if you're using it to publish you still have to do due diligence because of people who upload stuff belonging to others and mark it CC. For example, I'm dubious that this Jason Engle piece is actually CC-BY-ND licensed… – SevenSidedDie Sep 27 '10 at 22:09
And even then, BY-ND is questionable for use in a product, since you'd probably have to modify the image (making a derivative) to use it. – Kyle Willey May 21 at 18:31
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If you are willing to go for a certain feel, there is a huge body of illustration in the public domain.

When I laid out Love in the Time of Seið, which Matthijs Holter and I co-wrote, I found wonderful nordic fantasy illustrations using Google Books. I limited the time frame for results to pre-1910 and then scanned domestic American children's books for illustrations. In that case what I found was a pair of great books, so our illustrations are by Victor R. Lambdin and E. Boyd Smith, from Viking Tales by Jennie Hall (Rand McNally & Co, 1902) and In the Days of the Giants by Abbie Farwell-Brown (Houghton, Mifflin & Co, 1902) respectively. The .pdf versions were of high enough resolution that I could extract 300 dpi images.

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Are there some keyword/search criteria tricks you can share? – anon186 Sep 21 '10 at 14:27
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Use advanced search: books.google.com/advanced_book_search and control for appropriate date range, try subject-specific searches, you will have to scan some texts, so when you find likely sources, look for lists of illustrations, and also reduce page size so you can see many at once easily. Toggle "books only" and "full view only". – Jmstar Sep 21 '10 at 15:50
up vote 4 down vote

Just to help address the above,

http://www.fromoldbooks.org/ , http://www.oldbookart.com/

Generally when searching looking for Public Domain or Royalty Free (as opposed to creative commons, which while certainly works, I find has a much smaller body of stuff in it due to it being a license as opposed to a state like Public Domain in which things fall after so much time).

I used Liam's from old books (the first link) quite a bit and it works well. Its hard to find specifically fantasy stuff on it, but there is a great deal of victorian and 1910's children illustrations that work fantasically i find.

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Generating 60 CC-licensed black-and-white character portraits was the goal of the Kickstarter project "60 Terrible Character Portraits For Creative Commons Release". The project ended with enough funding to commision 108 character portraits, and the high-resolution images are available for download.

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Dover Books has sold compilations of royalty-free art for decades. Very affordable books, no additional costs. Be sure to review the extensive list on the left side of:

http://store.doverpublications.com/by-subject-art.html

Notable: Fantastic Ornament: 110 Designs and Motifs "Swirling with gargoyles, devils, dragons, griffins, and other images that haunt both dreams and nightmares..." (their blurb)

http://store.doverpublications.com/0486452298.html

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Can I scan a page and use it as I choose? – anon186 Sep 22 '10 at 20:12
That's exactly what I do, typically at a high dpi. Most are plain black & white. I heard a rumor that Dover had some compilations in digital form, but haven't found any yet. :/ – ExTSR Sep 22 '10 at 20:38
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Dover has explicit limits for commercial projects - I believe you can use a maximum of ten pieces per project, although that may vary by title. – Jmstar Sep 23 '10 at 11:42
A number of other publishers have collections on CD of royalty free art, as well. I've used several professionally. The terms of use vary by collection and publisher; I was doing work for a non-profit, but using personally owned collections, and was essentially free to make use of as much as I wanted provided I credited the source; for commercial for-profit releases, much more stringent restrictions applied. Many of the works are of limited application, but most of the collections have some that are suitable. It may often be less expensive to simply commission the right art, tho. – aramis Sep 24 '10 at 7:41

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