Jetrel over at wesnoth.org wrote an excellent article about how to bring in artists for your FOSS game project.  It's very good reading, especially for aspiring game designers.  Read it here:

Attracting and keeping artists on an OSS game project

Kudos to Jetrel for taking the time to write this up, and for allowing us to archive it here at OGA!

Greetings!

Among the many plans we have for this site, there is one particular project that I believe will be highly useful to the community -- namely, a system for building sprites out of separate parts, similar to this:

http://charas-project.net/charas2/index.php

...except able to deal with sprites of different sizes, and also shift color palettes.

Greets!

For aspiring pixel artists out there, Fil Razorback of Les Forges has graciously allowed me to translate his excellent pixel art tutorials into English!

You can view the English translations here. I think I did pretty well (with the aid of some Canadian friends and various web translation services), but if you see any issues, please don't hesitate to let me know via the contact form.

It's been painfully clear to me as I've set up this site that by far the most confusing aspect of art in Free and Open Source games is licensing. There have been innumerable discussions about it all over the big wide internets, and the only real consensus is that there are just too many of them.

Greets!

So, over the last couple of weeks, I've been trying to learn a little bit about pixel art. The image you see here is my current progress on my own base sprite. When it's done, my plan is to slap an open license or two on it and send it out into the ether. :)

I'd like to take a minute, though, to talk about my process. While I wouldn't call myself a particularly good pixel artist, I'm learning fairly quickly, thanks in large part to the help of some of the pixel art communities around the teh internets. Specifically, I'd like to plug:

Greets! A number of people have been asking how someone who isn't an artist might help OpenGameArt.org expand their archive. As you may or may not know, we only archive media from projects that have specifically given us permission to do so, regardless of the license used. At the moment, we have permission to archive art from three projects:

OpenGameArt.org is currently hosting a pixel art contest, which ends on August 1, 2009! We are looking for hair, faces, clothes, accessories, and other modifications to our base sprite sets. The entries don't need to be extensive, just cool. Here are the sprites you'll be working with:

By: Migel Angel Hijo de Pedro

By: Mandi Paugh

Greets!

In the last couple days, we've had a number of excellent submissions, including some awesome sprites and a bunch of battle sound effects. Check out our Latest Submissions page, or subscribe to the RSS feed!

Here are some highlights:

Attack sounds

Just wanted to let everyone know that the exclusive female base sprite has been posted. You can find it here.

OpenGameArt.org is running a pixel art contest! We're seeking hair, accessories, and other modifications to our male and female (to be released shortly) sprite bases, for a cash prize of US$100, or US$50 for second place! Read the rules and submit your entry today! All entries are due by August 1st, with winners to be announced on August 9th.

Sorry to duplicate this entry, but I had to blog it so it hits the RSS feed.