not sure if this is the right forum, couldn’t see a forum that this fit in…
I’m wanting to purchase some fantasy style pictures/artwork hand drawn that I would use a paintings for atmosphere in my game, I did not find anything suitable in the Asset store… any suggestions on where I could buy this?
Thanks,
Vanz
Google is your best friend 
You can go to any resource where artists hang out and try to commision someone.
Or you could google royalty free artworks for purchase/download. Unsplash seems to have some free paintings available.
If you want, you could also take some screenshots, of scenes from various fantasy games that you like, or game art from games that you like, and use that for inspiration too.
I’d check out somewhere like Deviant Art, find some people who’s stuff you like, and contact them to ask about licensing.
Another possibility is looking at royalty free image sites then adding painter-like filters using your image editing software. Just make sure you check the licenses for attribution / redistribution rights.
If you have some photography skills, or know some people who LARP, one technique i’ve used when I was designing publicity and media for use with an escape room was to take some pictures and run them through mediachance dynamic auto painter (DAP), then do some touch up in an image editor to suit your style.
Below are some examples from a video I made for them. Could be better with better equipment and lighting (it was an escape room which was totally indoors, that’s not a real door/window, the place was pretty dark, and we didn’t even have a DSLR), plus I was doing it for free so this was the limits of my effort. The nice part about using photography and DAP is that to get from the 2nd to the 3rd image, just walk forward and take a close up.
For your use case, not sure what you need, but you could maybe go photograph some landscape, some gothic buildings/castles, cemetery, crypts, or people in costume if you want (due to privacy reasons, I didn’t post any pictures with people, but it can be done).
It is important to keep in mind that kind of trick is INCREDIBLY obvious.
In majority of cases, it is impossible to mistake a processed photo for an actual artwork.
DAP actually has many settings and depending on your needs, can be pretty realistic (at least to me. hahaha). Also, he’s using it as background environment so maybe he’s requirements are not that high? Anyway, it’s just a suggestion for a fast and easy hack for poor people like me
Sorry but none of those look even remotely like artwork though, they look like photos with a filter on top…
I would not say this is a suggestion anyone else should follow.
I mean if it fits the game you are making, fake art is perfectly fine, but in majority of the cases it’s just bad.
i’m not an artist, so, my apologies if its a bad suggestion. Lucky I provided screenshots so others could point this out. Thank you! I will remove my post so as not to mislead anyone
I’ll only undelete them because I think your post is valid. I believe using filters on photos is a perfectly valid and even attractive idea for mobile games or adventure games.
Just because some people get stuck up, doesn’t mean the future generations have any idea it’s a bad thing ™. In the old days we had digitised graphics painted over like this. It had it’s fans like anything else. Being able to make something, is better than nothing.
For an art style like this, some people want to see it’s a photographic source. For them that’s appealing.
Well, I see a photograph.
I saw this kind of technique being used in a few visual novels (The very first tsukihime used this for backgrounds, for example, because they had no money), but it is obvious, never passes as a painting.
Few alternatives to it would be:
Basically there are two things that give away a processed photo.
Anyway, you CAN use this. But a lot of people won’t perceive it as a painting. Plenty will see a photo that was ran through a filter. Now the question is whether you need a stylized picture or a painting. It works as a stylized picture. Not as a painting.
Try to keep an open mind, one person’s dislike is another’s fancy.
No mate its not misleading Sorry if my post came across as saying your art does not look good - that was not my intention. I think it looks nice and as stated by another user, depending on the “style” you are going for it can be rather cohesive as a style!
Also as Hippo stated, making something is better than not having any art at all. I think its great that you are using ingenuity to get the task done.
My point was more that it wont fool people into thinking its 3D art, thats all!
That said, as Hippo stated there are many old games that used to do this and to be fair, I used to play a lot of them so I should have been a bit more clear in my comment and made it clear that I myself dont have anything against the style and used well can look nice
Keep up the good work mate, sorry you took it as bashing your art specifically!
Well then, sorry I even brought it up. 
Which is fine. Because it’s not a painting. But as filler for background stuff I don’t see anything wrong with it. I can’t remember the last time I looked at a random painting on the wall in a game and thought “well, the game would be better if these bits of art were nicer!”
In some games it matters, eg: The Council, where it’s a major element of the game. In many games there just needs to be something there, in which case… fill it at the lowest reasonable resource cost you can.
With the latest AI techniques it is actually getting pretty difficult to tell if a picture was done by a human or an AI:
I’m an illustrator and even I can totally see how for a small indie game it’s just not cost efficient to have all custom paintings commissioned for background artwork hanging on the virtual walls of your game’s world. In a AAA game like Dishonored it goes without saying those need to be proper paintings and I frequently stood in front of them while playing, to admire them for a bit. It helps of course, that they’re made by one of my favorite concept artists… Wouldn’t be doing that if those were just filtered photos, but in a small indie game, I wouldn’t expect to do this either. It’s much more important that the overall quality and feel is cohesive.
I always have a bit of an issue with these kinds of statements, because without the real paintings in the training set - made by humans - these neural nets can’t do shit. And some of the output image are so obviously randomly cobbled together from parts of different pictures, I have to question how far any of the individual pieces really is away from the corresponding images in the training data. Look at derpy-mcderpface in the lower left for example. Eyes, nose, mouth, none of that fits together.
So what are we really judging here?
I think style transfer and painting filters are actually the more interesting tech because you have more control via changing the input photo/picture.
I have recently noticed this in an increasing number of animes :(. But knowing in what conditions the creative workers of this industry work, I can’t fault them. It makes the games industry art jobs look like paradise in comparison…
Anime are increasingly using CG renders for backgrounds and filler objects and those CGs are frequently of very poor quality. I don’t recall ever seeing an actual processed photo anywhere in anime, but they definitely use stock photographs as reference or even for a paint over. The main issue is that majority of anime absolutely suck at computer animation and almost nobody get it right.
No, you shouldn’t spin camera around an anime-style 3d model, the illusion is going to break.
No, you shouldn’t use 60 fps 3d cell-shaded model in a 12fps character scene, it will stand out.
No, you can’t use bump mapping, run it through a filter and expect it to look great.
Here’s an example of a well-done anime CG with well-done hand-painted background. The girl is a 3d model.
Here’s another. This one looks … odd in motion, though.
Processed photos are incredibly common in manga instead. Mostly because in black and white they’re harder to spot.
Then we have koreans and chinese who use sketchup(!) for backgrounds and objects in their webtoons. Castle-nim says hi.
[/spoiler]
