WodenKrait wrote:
Regarding the artwork, I'm afraid on the whole I wasn't a fan. I found the many different styles or illustration, variances in colouring, and uneven image quality to be jarring and not aesthetically pleasing. The cover was perhaps the worst offender, as the CG dragon and treasure were not well executed and the pasted-on human figures do not integrate with the whole scene.
Speaking as someone that's looked for good public domain fantasy art, there is very little out there - if you can't draw (or afford to pay artists yourself), you're basically screwed.
There are some workarounds. For example, if you print out some art that you want to use, trace it, scan it back in to your computer and use scans of your traced image, then you are the copyright holder for the art, not the original artist. That's also why I hold the copyright to the DW maps in the Cobwebbed Forest and not SKG or Dave Morris. You can even do this for commercial products.
Alternatively, for a non-commercial work, you could just use the art without permission. It's not great karma, but so long as you've not profited from it, and haven't caused the original artist a loss of income, there is little an artist can do except ask you to attribute the art to them or ask you to remove it from the document (both of which are fair challenges and really ought to be respected, even if there's not much an artist can do to force you to do either). This is the approach I have taken with the Hollow Men, King Under the Forest, and Shadow on the Mist downloads I've made available - and will probably be what I do with the Brymstone and Axgrave downloads that will undoubtedly be making an appearance on my site in the coming months.