What's an Art Wash?
Need art?
I do. All the time. If you can afford to pay an artist to contribute to your TTRPG product please do, either by directly commissioning them or licensing their work (Drive-Thru has some wonderful images you can license).
Of course, public domain art is a great resource, too. I’ve found a lot of excellent images over the years, thanks in part to my previous life as a visual researcher in the Canadian TV industry. But often these images aren’t right for my product — not right away anyways. I need to clean them up. I need to put them through an ‘art wash’.
So that’s what I’m doing here. This will be the place I drop great images, some of which I’ve cropped, trimmed, cleaned, etc. The images will all be free domain and my edits of them will be released under a creative commons license. So you will be free to use them on any TTRPG product you want. All I ask is the following attribution:
Some free domain artwork sourced and optimized via artwash.substack.com
That’s it.
I’ll be posting images here for free. Paid memberships means you’ll get the whole archive of what goes here. Posts that are two weeks old go behind the paywall.
The images I put here will be things I personally find interesting. Paid subscribers can request certain types of images (one per month unless you are a ‘founding member’). Requested images will also be released under a creative commons license.
If you use any of these images in your game, please let me know (so I can promote your game here on substack).
So thanks for checking out Art Wash, please keep your windows and doors closed at all times.
Image: "Die Ruhe vor dem Sturm" oder "Verunglückte Wagenwäsche" von 1955 möglicherweise 1956 by Helmuth Ellgaard. Released under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported by the Familienarchiv Ellgaard.