Art and Inspiration in RPGs

Ernest Biéler. L'eau mysterieuse, 1911


I have been looking around for resources in order to collect art and images to use as props and worldbuilding materials for tabletop games. There is no substitute for personal knowledge of art but here are a few things I've found.

Ben L. at Mazirian's garden has a post about his creative process and one of thing he does for inspiration is to scour the web for artistic reference points, which he compiles into Pinterest collections on various themes.

I asked Skerples at Coins and Scrolls where he finds the art posted on the blog and he mentioned ArtStation and has other Wikimedia Commons. 

ArtStation is very good for all sorts of artists, particularly genre-based artwork for games. You can look at portfolios to get a sense of technique and subject matter. I'm not sure of fair use rules so I won't post anything here but the quality is excellent.

Wikimedia commons has a lot of public domain artwork and also has audio and video files. The links to historical artists are exceptional. 

 
These etchings by Gustav Doré are particularly evocative (h/t Skerples)


Google Arts & Culture is one I just noticed recently.

This is a very good resource because has good filters that allow you to look for art by type (painting, artifact, sculpture, etc.), medium, and historical period, even by colour. Particularly useful for things that don't show up as frequently in traditional searches (metalwork, more utilitarian objects, etc.).

Check out this Bohemian bone-plaque saddle :


AI text-to-image software

I started with Stable Diffusion as it appears to be free and easily accessible. I can report that on signing up you can get going almost immediately and it is free. The quality of image generation is okay but the software struggles with human faces and main subjects often merge together.

This image is what I got back from the prompt etching of a knight jousting a dragon in the style of Gustav Doré :


The surrealistic merging of horse and dragon seems to be a consistent feature. I think the human face issues are intentional in order to prevent users from creating realistic depictions of living people. The software was decent at producing certain types of photos probably available in stock imagery. 

I also used Midjourney as a comparison. It is easily accessible through discord, but it isn't free. You get a trial of 25 images and then after that you can buy monthly access for $10 a month. The images are much more detailed than Stable Diffusion and you have the option to 'upgrade' them, yielding a more detailed and higher-resolution image. This is intricate sci-fi greenhouse garden interior in the style of Moebius, hanging vines, lights :


That is the upscaled version. The basic version looks like this (top left) :


I'm still getting the hang of creating prompts but as you can see these could be excellent for inspirational images. Midjourney was capable of creating some stellar pieces but I'm not quite sure how complex you can be with the prompts before they start to break down. 

My impression of the image-generators at this stage is that they are not yet able to replace other forms of image gathering unless you have a wide tolerance for the output. They are good at the surreal but not so good for representing real diegetic images. Exceptional for inspiration, they are truly the random tables of the image search world.

Artists are great at stylized images, relatively consistent work within a given portfolio and knowing what they are attempting to represent. This is underrated and allows artists to do things that are specific, complex, and not widely represented within large search engines.

Huge image aggregators can be great depending on the filters you can use. I find sorting by artist and historical period and medium at least as useful the image content for a lot of things. It's also often useful to be able to see information about the image source (thus why Google image search can be frustrating).


I hope to revisit this post and add to it as I find more resources. Please add anything you think I've missed.

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