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[Lynx]

Thought I'd share a link to Concept Ships with y'all.  So much amazing art and so many ideas for how to design spaceships and other bits of technology for game settings!

Any fun places you guys go to for your art inspiration when you want to make your next game/character/level/project/etc. more creatively interesting?

Edit: post 100.  Go me!

[Squiggly_P]

bookmarked.  Thanks for that.

One of the places I hit up every day before I do anything else is Sijun Forums "Speed Painting" thread: http://forums.sijun.com/viewtopic.php?t=29807

note, I linked to the first page, but it's best to start at the last page and go backwards, since a lot of the earlier images will be broken.  It also grows by about a page or two every day.  There are 1083 pages of speed paintings by people of various art backgrounds.  It's just a massive inspiration for me.

[Lynx]

Must avoid feelings of utter abject inferiority!  That's some pretty awesome art there, thanks. :D

[Xion]

Ah, conceptships - haven't been there in an age and a half. Thanks for resurfacing it to my site-awareness-radar.

http://drawn.ca/ is hugely inspiring for me.

http://www.shoeboxblog.com/?cat=1312 makes me laugh without exception.

http://www.shorpy.com/ has greatly awesome photos that really pump me up for some reason.

Are we only talking about frequently updated things?

[Lynx]

Frequently updated and/or thematic would be nice, IMO, but whatever inspires, as long as it's in some way game-related, and that's a lot of ground covered.

Right now I'm trying to figure out how to draw some ships that don't look like utter junk.  Perhaps I need to get better tools than MS-Paint and GIMP...  Edit to add: yes, they'll be pixelly ships, i.e. 16x64 and 96x32.

[Xion]

Ah, but only game-related seems a bit limiting - inspiration can come from other fields as well, yes?

[Lynx]

Well, I'm meaning in the sense of 'you could make a great game from this stuff if you could figure out how to stuff the art into an engine'.   But yes, it's not a real limitation.  F'rex:

Bots with stuff - sure!  Happens all the time.

Vintage photos - plenty of application to 50s-style pulp SF games like 'It Came From Outer Space' or B-monster movies attacking.  Gotta have settings that say 'I'm totally 50s'.

And so forth!

[Pishtaco]

I tend to try to evoke some historical period. So for Stacker I looked at a lot of Soviet posters (in principle ones from the 70s and 80s). For the Clatter of the Keys I looked at very old typewriters and typewriter ads. For Venus Patrol I want some kind of British post-war feeling, but I haven't worked out quite what I mean by this yet. I have a vague memory of seeing lots of paperback book covers with stylized drawings in black, red and white on them, but I haven't tracked down any good examples yet. What I am looking at at the moment is stuff like www.foils.org/popbook.htm (has some nice transport book covers from the 60s) and www.cornstalk.com.au/auspulp.htm (Australian pulp paperbacks, many with aeroplanes).

[michael]

hotlink this shit!