I am going to have a couple months of after work free time coming up and I would like to generate some art, probably monster art suitable for OSR type projects.  At the moment I am considering buying a 12 inch or so Wacom type tablet for this.  As I don't really have much experience with the correct file size, resolution, and measurements of art for publication can anyone enlighten me on these?  

In addition, I plan of offering (at least some) of these drawings as OGC art via a channel like my FreeDnDArt page.  I plan to also take submissions for other OGC art (there will be some sort of screening process to exclude non-OGC copyright art).  The benefit of keeping the art OGC rather than a CC standard would be that the art could only be used in OGC products and not for something like say lunchboxes or whatnot, and the artist would keep the copyright (if they wanted to make lunchboxes or whatnot).  

I think there needs to be more efficiency in the OSR art sphere.  At the moment, it seems to me that the OSR projects could benefit greatly from more access to better art.  Over the past few years the situation has improved greatly, but it can still be expensive to produce a fully stocked monster collection.  Yes, there are resources like clip art and stock art collections that are available through various places, but even those can add up.  For example, ADD Bestiary only reached about a third of its proposed art budget.  As great as the book is, with more art it would be even cooler!  

Just about everyone in the field has some doodles or full blown art laying around, wouldn't it be groovy of we could all share it and utilize it?

Once I produce some art I will start posting it.  Maybe once a stable collection has been grown, I can also throw a zip up on DF, rpgnow and paizo for easier access.

Anyone have any other ideas?  I am all ears!

(Also posted on DF)

In terms of output the artwork should be at least 300dpi at final printed size, and preferably in PNG format.

Yeah, you're going to want 300 dpi minimum for color and grayscale files, and 600 minimum for black and white. PNG isn't a real standard print format but should be ok for grayscale and b/w; color, ehhh, it probably won't be a huge deal but you are converting the color to RGB. I'd probably put up .pngs for display/web and .tif files for print just to make things easier on people.

Size... I'd say 4 inch square minimum. But, you know, whatever, if it's a gold coin or something it shouldn't matter. The art can always be downsized, so don't shrink anything (unless for some reason it's enormous). And don't scale up your art to meet the minimum size, that's pointless.

File size is unimportant within these parameters – it just makes for quicker downloads and less space usage on your end.

Also, if you haven't played around with a Wacom tablet before, find a way to do so – not everyone takes to them and I personally have never been very satisfied with Wacom output for 100% of my drawing.

I hope I'm not going too slow to be helpful here!

Landscapes! There's a lot of free portrait and monster art, but little in the way of where to situate them. Granted, you do run the risk of the sticker collection effect, where landscapes are stamped with stickers having no regard to perspective, lighting, etc...

Thanks for the input.  I ordered the following:

http://www.bravod.com/product/ST_2121_en.html

which should be arriving tomorrow.  I look forward to playing around with it.  it cost about $90.  600 dpi for b/w.  

Got it!

Quote from: Opaopajr;710854Landscapes! There's a lot of free portrait and monster art, but little in the way of where to situate them. Granted, you do run the risk of the sticker collection effect, where landscapes are stamped with stickers having no regard to perspective, lighting, etc...

That sounds hilarious. Yeah, I wouldn't do that.

Quote from: Teazia;711847Thanks for the input.  I ordered the following:

http://www.bravod.com/product/ST_2121_en.html

which should be arriving tomorrow.  I look forward to playing around with it.  it cost about $90.

That's an amazingly cheap tablet!  I'd love to find a price on their 17" monitor tablet, but a quick search didn't turn up any vendors.

I use a Wacom Cintiq 12WX, which I'm very happy with for painting. Recently, though, I've rediscovered the joy of working on paper - I find my sketching to be much more precise and expressive on paper compared to the textureless glass of a tablet.