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Hey, we need an artist to help us make our game look less terrible. The current art is programmer art, which is not that great. We are looking for someone to draw assets for our game.

Thank you in advance.

I am a programmer who cannot make good art to save my life, and so I have also had to search for artists before. It helps to provide information about your project. You do not say anything about your game, its genre, its style, the desired aesthetics you have in mind, and so on. The more such information you offer, in my experience, the more likely you are to grab the attention of artists; think of it as an exercise in marketing your game. It also helps to discuss any compensation you can bring to the table. If you have a budget and can afford to pay a prospective artist—that’s awesome. But a lot of us indie developers have little to nothing in the way of financies for such things. That makes it even more important to ‘sell’ the idea of your game, because no one wants to work for free on a game that doesn’t interest them. If you have a project page for your game, can show its current status and design, anything like that, then you will have better odds of finding an artist to help.

Hopefully that will help you find an artist for your team, and best of luck both on your search and your game.

I would have no problem with auditioning for the role. I'm fairly decent with Photoshop and the sort. I'm not your "wacom graphics tablet X2500GXM+ TURBO" sort of guy, but I am art-minded and could even have interesting input for your game idea

As far as tools go, I would suggest looking into GIMP and Spine:

http://www.gimp.org
http://esotericsoftware.com/

If you've ever played Dust: An Elysian Tale, then Spine will seem familiar as it creates 2D puppets. It really is awesome with what it can do. However, I would suggest learning how to create a skeleton before buying it. I was lucky to buy the pro version at $75. They promise free updates for life, at least.

GIMP is like Photoshop. I think the most important tool the software has is its resemblance to Adobe Photoshop's layers. PNG images are my favorite object to work with.