Placeholder Art Sources

And not IMAGE(S). What I mean by this is to find ONE (1) suitable image and use that on all the cards. Let's face it, even IF you find placeholder artwork for all your cards, there is no way it's all going to look cohesive.

Take for example my SPACE game: I use a picture of some stars. And put that on every card that did not have a FINISHED piece of artwork.

But since I wanted PRELIMINARY artwork, I invested in $1,000 worth of it to demonstrate what the final product would look like.

I see people using all kinds of placeholder artwork and I CRINGE... Often it just looks BAD.

So I would advise to keep it to one placeholder image and invest in some preliminary artwork to try to SELL your game.

Just my 2 cents.

Think THEME: if your game is about farming, put a farm. If your game is about Dragons, find one (1) cool dragon and put it on the cards without artwork... Something cohesive like that. Very few games look appealing with placeholder artwork - and you don't want people to get confused like: "Is this what the FINAL artwork will look like?" Know what I mean?

check sites like freepic or iconarchive - there are tons of free clipart sites on the net. only downside is that they provide the images at 72dpi not 300dpi - but for a quick test mockup this should not be a problem.

I wonder if the art my be used commercially, but at least no one will sue you if you use it and show it around to a crowd of people.

use the search functions of sites: if you are doing a helloween game, search for witches, pumpkins and candies etc. they usually come up with very basic "everyday" artworks, but that should do the trick for now.

I tend to find that if I want placeholder art, I can often find something usable on pixabay.com. Combine that with the icons on game-icons.net and thenounproject.com and I'm usually pretty much set. I have one game (currently on a back-burner) where pretty much all the art is old engravings/copperplate sourced from old books on gutenberg.org, which has some fantastic stuff, but isn't really set up for image searching.

As for the comment about prototypes with bad art; it all depends on where you are going with a project. I'd tend to just use any old thing to start with (it really doesn't matter if it looks shonky to start) and then gradually improve the presentation if the game warrants it. But then, I have no intention of ever doing self-publishing (other than as free PnP) so artwork is not my highest priority.

contrary to what @radioactivemouse said (while I understand and honor your statement) - art is to me part of the core design.

I usually get bored when my prototypes dont look pretty. and in fact, artwork is to me - and yes, this is a rather obscure point of view - part of the mechanics itself. a good looking game sets itself apart so much compared to a bad looking one and it is connected strongly to the overall look and feel of a game.

this even goes as far, as i try to incorporate art ASAP into the games design, as later on it just feels tacked on and not right (im not a big fan of re-themes or applying a theme afterwards as you might have guessed).

of course, nothing excuses bad mechanics - but good art, adds this extra layer of goodness.

There are a lot of open-source computer games with artwork that is good enough for a prototype; just check the terms of the license under which the artwork falls (which will sometimes be a little different to the software license). For instance, if it is under the CC-BY-SA license, then the artwork may be reused and modified, but the original creators must be attributed, and your version of the artwork -though not the game itself- must be released under a similar license (so it is not really an issue for a private-use prototype not intended for distribution).

Old illustrated books that have passed into the public domain (eg on Project Gutenberg) can also yield good artwork - I think there's at least one fairly well-known game designer who releases print-and-play games using art from this or similar sources.

Also, the well-known open-source image editor called "the gimp" has some tools which allow generation of certain types of art with almost no effort - for instance there is a random map generator or a library of textures that can be used to produce planets for a space-themed game with only a few seconds of effort; also drop-in flares for stars. It also has some special brush tools which create an image with one click (leaves, stars, explosions, vegetables and various other things). A little more effort than clip-art, but really only a little. Other graphics software might be even better at this; I just mention it in particular because I'm quite familiar with it.

Finally, looking forward (and applying the open-source principle, which I strongly approve of), there is nothing to stop anyone willing here from collaboratively putting together a collection of freely available self-made artwork and component templates for anyone to use for prototyping purposes. I'd contribute to it, of course.

I'm a huge fan of textures.com – obviously it's not going to work for specific graphics like objects or people or the like, but it's dirt easy to grab some decent textures from the site for card backs or backgrounds or to put underneath a black line drawing map, to give a little depth to the prototype. There are plenty of situations where having useful backgrounds can be a differentiator, too (for example, a "desert infantry" vs "mountain infantry" could be the same stock graphic with sandy stone backgrounds on the first and a craggy rock on the second).

If you use a LOT of natural textures of contrasting colors though, they can be pretty jarring, so I usually slap a gray layer on top of the base texture and then tweak the opacity so that the texture comes through as (for example) grass without being punch-in-the-face green grass.

I'm definitely in favour of using varied placeholder art. Even if it's inconsistent or poor quality, one of the functions of art is to make cards and other components easily recognisable from across a table; playtesters being able to recognise a card at a distance by a simple image is easier than having to keep picking up every card to check the text.

As others have suggested, just use open source/free clip art, there's plenty out there.

Ditto above reply. I design the card first (name, stats, etc.) then find an image online that's in the ballpark. I couldn't imagine designing the other way around, but I'm more of a mechanics guy than a theme guy. Also, I make sure each picture I find is tonally, thematically, and artistically similar to everything else I've chosen. I find prototypes with clashing art styles to be more distracting than ones without any art.

Www.opengameart.org is for digital gaming but they have some (a lot of space ships) 2d art that is free. Some of the artists can be contacted & are occasionally willing to make more in the same style as the other stuff they put up.
Www.opengameart.org

I used to use another site for textures, again it's for 3D stuff but works just as well for 2d. From memory it was
Www.cgtextures.com