First a note for the uninitiated:

FaiB = "Free as in Beer".  Zero cost to the consumer.

FaiF = "Free as in Freedom".  Doesn't refer to cost, but to freedoms/liberty given to the consumer.  Also called "FaiS" = "Free as in Speech".

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Art is proprietary by default.  An artist has to make efforts to learn about copyright law, individual freedoms, and open source licenses to choose to create FaiF art.

Copyright law is very technical and left-brain.  Compare to art which is creative and right-brain, and art culture that says "great artists steal".

Most people just want to make money from their art.  They don't think to themselves "proprietary licenses is the only way to accomplish this".  They don't think that far.  They probably don't even know their art is copyrighted the moment they create it.  They post work to deviantArt, or FaiB games to websites, hoping to get noticed and find paying work from it.

It's hard to recruit people to make open source art.  It takes education and convincing.  One method that's worked great for me: I pay artist actual, real money for commission work and request they release the art under a CC-BY-SA license.  That doesn't take much convincing: they get paid, AND (after some explaining) they feel good about their art being used by the community.

A glance at DeviantArt shows that people don't know much about copyright and creative commons.  Many works are tagged with an icon that says "You don't have permission to use this!", even though the copyright note on every page clearly means the same thing.  Other works say "Feel free to reuse this, just give me credit!" but the submitter did not choose CC-BY which would accomplish the same thing.

Assume all artists have their own pet projects/interests.

When you have a free game project, attracting and keeping artists is almost impossible.  You have to somehow convince them to ignore their own awesome projects/interests and give their precious time to yours.

How to convince them?

1. Have a core, active crew.

A game project with one core artist and one core programmer is already farther than most projects ever get.  It helps if these core people are good friends who came up with the idea for the game together.  The core crew has to consider the project their own baby.  New artists who want to help can take directions from the core artist (same with core/new programmers).

2. Communicate

Tweet, blog, forums.  The core crew needs to talk about everything, out in the open.  If your site looks like it hasn't been updated in three months, people assume your project is dead.

3. Money

It's hard to get professional quality art without professional quality pay.  I pay artists when I need a fresh perspective on my project, or to fill gaps I can't cover as a core artist.

4. Demo

You might attract volunteer artists later once your project had a solid early beta and the core gameplay wows audiences.  Until then, pay bounties to get the core pieces complete.  Pull together one hero, one creature, one tileset, one level, one background song.  Invest time in a level editor.  Now other artists can come to your world and create their own stories, levels, etc.

5. Be Awesome

If your game idea and execution is lame, you won't even attract players (much less artists).

6. Know your limits

A lot of game projects seem doomed before they start because their scope is far too large.  An MMO takes 50-200 people working 3-6 years.  A simple puzzle or arcade game could take 1 person 6-12 months.

When "free" means OGA-free, then the answer is yes, as there exist much free content on the web, which is being used for freeware and commercial, but not for OGA-free games.

I think there are a few excellent games on this list.

I think pfunked summarized it quite well. There are a few separate issues here:

• Open content as such.
• High barrier of entry.
• Getting people to work for free on their spare time (especially for/with others).

The most obvious way to remove the last one is to simply pay people, like pfunked suggested. There are other ways, but they are much harder (if cheaper). As for the barrier of entry; it's certainly desireable to use FOSS, but in my opinion it's perfectly acceptable to use proprietary software to produce open content. The workflow should ideally be flexible in this regard.

In an ideal FaiF world all artist would already be using FOSS and default to using an open license. That's a rather huge leap to try to make all at once though.

I wonder if programmers are less reluctant to produce open content because of more stable day jobs? Artist on the other hand often have to try to sell their art on their own. So in a way, rather than a programmer doing free work on their "spare time" as a hobby, a better comparison might be a programmer spending a few hours of their work day on open software - without getting payed.

This is just an impression I've gotten, but isn't it much more common for programmers to start the projects than artist? Maybe the artists would be more motivated if the programmers were implementing their visions rather than the other way around.

Ok, I'll stop now...

There is also the fact (concerning the programmers VS artists point) that with art there is no such thing as closed source. You can freely take inspiration and copy (&paste) from any source. Sure plagatising is a big issue in artists circles when it comes to actually publishing works, but for learning and all that it's considered ok. Therefore artists never get into contact with the idea of open-source, while a programmer frustrated by not being able to see the source of the program will sooner or later automatically find some open-source implementation of the problem (and thus know about open-source and the idea behind).

I think the main point is that most artists don't know about CC-BY-SA and co, while most programmers know about GPL and co. That makes a huge difference already!

I don't think it's only a matter of knowledge, but also of a (perceived?) lack of successful open art projects - in the software world there are a multitude of open licenses and programs, some of which has been around for ages.

I certainly agree though; this is primarily a question of knowledge/maturity/experience. My guess is that the same development will happen in art as in software; the more prevalent open content becomes, the more accepted it will be, and in turn more open content will be produced. It's a neat cycle, but I don't think it will reach critical mass just yet. Until it does, I think our best bet it to try to make it as simple and attractive as possible.

@Udi: yes, that's basically it. Of course there are artists with day jobs and freelancing programmers, so there are exceptions. On the whole though I'd say it holds. And certainly, quite a few artists does use FOSS projects to get an opportunity to work on something that interests them and make a name for themselves.

@Julies: I believe that is true. It is also not uncommon that experienced artists share their methods and workflows, even if they never use open licenses.

Anyway, I still say there're a few different issues here. Udi, could you clarify? Motivating people to work for free, FaiF art as such, or practical and social barriers that are prevalent right now?

>This is just an impression I've gotten, but isn't it much more common for programmers to start the projects than artist? Maybe the artists would be more motivated if the programmers were implementing their visions rather than the other way around.

>Ok, I'll stop now...

Interesting notion. This has of course its reasons: programmers can show a working demo without artists, using placeholder art. Artists can't just use "concept gameplay". Of course, artists make much better concept art, but you don't get attention for showing concept art. In the Open Source / Free culture world, working code is what matters (quite possibly because it all started with software). This can be solved by teaching artists to program, but that solution is backwards.

However, education can still help to cross the gap: not by teaching (young aspiring) artists to program, but by teaching them to use open source / FaiS tools, or otherwise showing them the road to open source.

There are lots of hurdles to overcome with free projects. Half a dozen FaiF art/texture projects on Sourceforge, but none of them went anywhere. Still trying to figure it why they never make it past a certain point. Is it the lack of payment and/or recognition with open projects?

I think the problem has more to do with spread of open source and the general impression it makes on people.

Main reason open source started was that coders were fucked by the copyright system so they ended up designing law "code" to go around that. The idea caught on both for ideological and practical reason (having access to source).

Good point is that there is nothing quite like "source code" in art. E.g. you can get a decent idea about how some picture or 3D model is "implemented" just from looking at it, you don't have to go through anything like dissasembling in coding world.

Most artists simply don't know about open source (they're both less likely to have problems with copyright - which was designed for art, not code, _and_ there is less direct practical gain, although it's not zero). Many encountered the fanatic kind of open source people who'd want everything under GPL, which doesn't make a good name for it, or get the impression that open source is somehow "communist". (And some communists get the wrong idea too, and end up worsening the situation for open source).

But mostly it's simply that they don't know and don't really care about stuff like licensing.

As was pointed out already, there are many who create free, but not open source art. Many of them might simply be against open source or don't care but most just don't know what it is. Promotion would help here.

I think there are two ways most such artists can get in contact with open source:

1) software:

Historically, open source software for artists has been lagging behind closed source (even some freeware) on technical terms. E.g. less features, and very commonly worse or just too different GUI. Your random artist isn't going to replace his (more often pirated than not among those creating free content) Photoshop + 3dsMax/Maya/Cinema4d/Whatever with Gimp + Blender if the latter won't give them some practical advantage.

Fortunately, recently open source artist software seems to be getting its act together. Blender is the best example IMO. Its development is skyrocketing, and it's beginning to race for cutting edge features with the best of closed source programs. Its UI got much more newbie-friendly _and_ configurable and its smoothing most of its rough edges. Recently I've seen threads on big professional sites like CGSociety.org with people considering moving to Blender just on its technical merits. And the people confused about what its "business model" is. This is where people notice open source and some might start considering using it themselves (even if it's unlikely to be the case for majority of their art). Businesses didn't move to Linux server because it was cheap, or for ideological reasons, but because it was superior.

Gimp also seems to be getting its act together. Its still IMO quite far behind Photoshop on technical terms, but I tried 2.7.x development branch and there are huge strides in The Right direction.

2) Existing art/games.

Now of course one can create open source art with proprietary tools, and many (most?) do. The best way to promote this is existence of communities such as OGA itself. We can get more artists exposed to OGA by promoting it on various forums outside, but we also need a lot of existing art on OGA for some "wow factor". Most artists won't contribute to an art site that has little or low quality art. Currently OGA can't compare in quantity or quality with e.g. DeviantArt, CGSociety, ConceptArt.org, etc. The best way to solve this is by improving skills and posting more, better content to OGA.

Open source games are also important and another place where people can get in contact with the idea. Unfortunately, most existing games seem like a pile of random stuff without an art direction (a result of badly managed open source project). However, there are good examples, especially Wesnoth. Games such as Wesnoth are excellent for converting modders - they are way more moddable than anything proprietary bout there (well, maybe with exceptions like UDK) and already have some existing good work so a modder can mod instead of creating all the game content from scratch.

Another good example seems to be Xonotic. After the Nexuiz fiasco (which IMO was taken a little too emotionally, but well...) they got a lot of new people and seem to have much clearer art direction, design goals, faster development etc. (Nexuiz was a typical example of a pile of random stuff).

Ah well. huge post.

I agree ;)

You bring up one interesting additional point however... first impressions often count and high quality art definitly attracts more people to a site.

IMHO this is something OGA does not do perfectly yet. I think the featured art should be probably put more prominently on the main page (like CGTalk for example has their eyecandy pictures up front) and very carefully selected for good pieces with a "wow" factor (including the removal of older pieces). Also someone should make sure the pieces there have really nice preview pictures.

The new 2D and 3D art selection is much less important and could be made smaller and below the featured art section!

Well maybe something to consider for OGA 2.0?

DeviantArt also puts its best foot forward.  The two ways to sort art there are Popular (default) and Newest.

Maybe the front page could use some algorithm to show popular art.  Something like this: popularity = (num_favorites / age_in_days) as opposed to showing only new art, or only featured art.

I was actually thinking about having the list be popular in the last 30 days, to show recent stuff.  That would move some of the old, self-reinforcing ones off of the list.

I think this is the first time I have read through a whole forum post from start to finish, great topic!

Is free art harder to make?

I think, free art is
a) hard(er) to use &
b) hard(er) to alter.

Let's say, some game developer needs a character. He would find a few ones on OGA, but the questions coming up might be:
How often have they used before in other projects? How well-known are they, how "lame" would it be to use them?

So I think, free art should be as moddable as possible. Having access to the sources (aka blend & xcf or respective formats) is just a step to rate the "moddability" of a piece of art, but doesnt grant it itself. Someone with more knowledge might correct me, but I think, with most 3D stuff you can do only very minor tweaks - if you want to avoid a complete retexturing/rerigging. About 2D stuff I have only very little clue, but it seems to me that you can alter the colors maybe, but for all others aspects, it is like: Use it as is, or take it as inspiration for a start-from-scratch.

One way to solve this is to offer half-done things, where someone has to put additional own work into the model to make it usable, but will also, as kind of side-effect, individualize it.
Another way might be the development/usage of "generators", like makehuman.org, as a generator of human meshes. I would like to make a little inspirative list here, but I am heavily lacking of examples.

Maybe it is too easy to pass the buck to the artist's side by saying "Your art is nice, but its not unique enough for me, because it is free". Also one might argue, that almost every good actor appears in several movies. You can even say, the better an actor is, the longer is the list of movies he participated in (with numerous exceptions in B-movie genre, of course). So why shouldn't good models be used in several games then?

I'm starting to forget what I wanted to point out, so maybe it's time to stop here ;)

This is absolutely true, but I think it is the case because the artist doesn't think about that, or wants it this way. For example sunburn's latest art submitions are very flexible, for example http://opengameart.org/content/eyeballs . Of course this doesn't work with everything, but with a little (even more) effort, art can be made moddable enough imo.

Absolutely true.  Sunburn's eyeball piece is exemplary in how the Open Source (I'd say Free Software, but I think Open Source applies a bit more in this case) philosophy can be applied to art, in two ways:

• He provided the "source" files used to create the art, and
• He released a second version based on comments he received.

Ideally, open source art should include all of the intermediate steps used to create it, to allow someone to pick it up at any point during the workflow and take it in a new direction.

There have been some instances where I've been hesitant to include source files due to them being for proprietary applications (like FL Studio or ZBrush), although I'm leaning toward including those anyway.  Thoughts?

Well for sure it doesn't hurt to include them, but ultimatle in open-source projects these are usually of little use.

Besides, who needs zbrush, when Blender has good scupting tools :p

I suspect the reason why artists often aren't willing to work for free on someone else's game are the same reasons why many programmers like me aren't willing to work for free on someone else's idea. We all have are own ideas to work on, and if it's something done for fun and for free, we'd rather do that, than do it for someone else.

Game art probably involves more work that's uninteresting to artists - it's not enough to draw a 2D character, you have to draw a whole load of frames, each in a whole load of orientations. For 3D, you have to make sure it can be animated. They have to work with the programmer to make sure it's in a format that's suitable for the game engine.

There's also consistency - a game ideally needs a whole set of work in a vaguely consistent manner, both from an aesthetic point of view (the same theme etc), and a technical point of view (e.g., 3D games ideally want meshes in the same format, with things like animation being done in the same way; if characters can hold objects, wear clothes etc, this needs to all work together too). I suspect many artists may prefer to simply work on different ideas, rather than putting their effort all into one massive project.

"My thoughts is that in the case of open source there are many games that are either uninteresting or just clones so you don't get excited about the game thus no motivation to participate"

I don't know if being clones is an issue. Games like FreeCiv and Widelands seem to have attracted plenty of people to produce content. In the commercial world, many games are clones but still attract much interest (the many FPS clones; or the ever growing Civilization franchise, as well as the unofficial Call To Power games). If anything, I'd argue clones may attract more interest, as people know and love the commercial equivalents, where as an original idea is untested - and what sounds good on paper, often doesn't work out in reality.

I think it's probably the case that artists are more likely to be attracted to established projects (or at least a playable game with placeholder graphics), than doing work for a programmer's new project that may end up going nowhere.

Even when I was willing to pay for art, I've come across artists who would not work with me because I was open source. They insisted on retaining the rights to the artwork and licensing it to me for my game only.

HTML5 Canvas Old School RPG

Slightly off-topic, but I was shocked to come across a similar issue with wedding photographers - that it seems standard practice for them to retain the copyright, even though you're paying them for the work. For my brother's wedding, they received the full batch of photos he'd taken, but they were stamped with an ugly "copyrighted" watermark, the idea being they'd have to pay extra for each and every photo. Couples would be committing piracy just to give a copy to their friends, or upload to Facebook.

So although it's not a game related thing, I do wonder if there does seem to be a philosophy among artists that's different to programmers. I get paid to program for my day job, but that means I don't expect to keep the copyright too.