Just thought that some of you might find this post interesting:

"What I asked for were two illustrations in a painterly style — one for a boxart mockup, and another for the game’s title screen. I had some rough ideas for their compositions, but I didn’t dwell on those. Instead, I focused on details such as: theme, compensation ($200 USD, half upfront and half after completion), due date, payment method (PayPal), and delivery format (Photoshop PSD files, with the title screen divided into various layers).

Now $200 USD isn’t a very large amount, so I wasn’t expecting too much interest..."

http://www.significant-bits.com/how-i-got-art-for-my-game-part-1

Interesting read, some very tallented people.

Thanks, glad you enjoyed it. And yeah, there's a lot of talented artists out there, so I was hoping to provide some concrete info on how I contracted 'em that other developers might find useful.

If you guys are interested, here are two more posts in the series:

"What quickly became apparent is that most pixel artists judged the budget of a work strictly by the amount of pixels it involved. What this meant is that the price tag of an image grew exponentially with its sizes. For example, if a 50×50 image cost $10, a 100×100 image would cost $40."

http://www.significant-bits.com/how-i-got-art-for-my-game-part-2

"Not wanting to alienate any of the artists, I offered $20 each for a simple animation test. It wasn’t a lot, but it was better than nothing. From our point of view, it also quickly added another $120 that we had to spend (although one of the artists was nice enough to actually send the money back when we didn’t choose him).

This turned out to have been a very good idea..."

http://www.significant-bits.com/how-i-got-art-for-my-game-part-3

And the final entry in this series is now up:

"In total there were 12 spell icons, 12 status effect icons and 8 portraits, with a bit of palette-swapping/layering to cut down on the work. Alice was quite comfortable with this and we paid her $200 for all the images."

http://www.significant-bits.com/how-i-got-art-for-my-game-part-4

That's cool, but saying $200 is a small amount doesn't mean much unless you base it against something. Think about your game's sales. Say you make $2000, that means you've spent 10% of your revenue on the box art and intro screen. In my opinion that's too much. If you don't even manage to make $2000 (which many Indie Games have not) then it's an even greater precentage.

Over the past 11 months developing our games we've worked with some very talented modellers and artists, all of whom are contracted for a profit share. In most cases this is 10% of the final profits of the game (since the contributions are large, for example on our FPS/Helicopter game we have 3x 3D Artists, 1x Animator, 1x Composer, 1x Concept Artist and 1x 2D Artist all of whom wil receive 10% of profits, as well as a bunch of people who have provided individual pieces of work free of charge for use in the game.

Your art work does look nice, but all I'm saying is you could've probably got someone else to do it for half as much, or free. At Retroburn Game Studios we share a passion for our work and just want to get our work out and released to the public for exposure and portfolio building. It's not about the money for us, and many other people interested in game development think the same way.

Very interesting read.  I'm glad that everything worked out they way you wanted it to and fit your budget. 

Well, the standard I used for measuring the amounts was a rough hourly rate -- if the artists could make more money working at McDonald's in the amount of time they devoted to creating the artwork, then I couldn't really say I paid them a whole lot. Granted this was offset by the fact that making said artwork was probably much more fun and a better experience. It's great to hear that you have an enthusiastic team that believes in your project and is willing to contribute based on a shared-revenue model, but that was something we wanted to avoid (at least for this project). Also, I fully realize the scope of sales when it comes to XNA games, which is why we're looking at releasing the game through other means.

I'm glad you posted these, and I hope other developers take note.  Personally, I feel that the majority of indie games suffer from horrendous artwork, and since it's almost the first thing that any consumers judges, should be an area worth investing into.  There are a LOT of talented artists online, and a little searching and careful budgeting can do a lot for indie games.   Besides, most of the good art online is what I would consider indie anyway, and most of the artists I've worked with would jump on the opportunity to work on a game.

Thanks a lot for the posts, they were very interesting and helpful.

Also gives a good hint about price, because I have absolutely no clue what when it comes art.

Heh, well not every game can have the same level of hand-crafted visuals as Dust, but I think you're completely right about aesthetics. Many games have made a name for themselves chiefly on their looks, and that's something that's lacking in lots of XNA titles. Even if your game relies on procedurally generated art, a nice title screen, "box art" and UI can go a long way towards making it look that much more appealing, and it doesn't have to cost an arm and a leg.

As for revealing the figures we paid to the artists, that was definitely a focus of the posts. When I started looking for artists, I didn't know much about pricing other than it could vary drastically. It was incredibly difficult finding any examples or templates to reference, so I decided to just take the plunge and post the details of my the experience. Hopefully it can prove useful to other developers out there.

@Radek

This was very interesting series of articles to read, even though in our times we are set to do both aspect of arts (graphics & audio) we will still keep this in mind.  I was also surprises to see some very harsh response/comments with your demands :-(.  I don't think you were unreasonable and hope if we look for outsourcing some of the artwork that we wont get that kind of trouble.

Thanks again for sharing.