A collection of where to find solutions to all of your visual art needs:

 

Where to find art assets:

2D

Kenny makes great 2D art and has started to add 3D art too!

Has Gaphics has sprites and textures for indie developers.

Mayang’s Free Textures, CGTextures also has a bunch of textures.

Open Game Art Free to use and free of copyright.

OpenClipArt and Clker has creative commons licensed clip art. Good for icons, buttons, and such.

Glitch has put up all of their art assets up for free after their game shutdown. This is truly an excellent resource for beautiful 2D art.

Grandma’s Graphics has a vast collection of storybook art from the olden days.

3D

Yobi3D is a search engine for 3D models.

3D models for free as does Archive 3D and Free 3D Models.

TurboSquid has a large collection of models from $1 and up.

CGTrader is another marketplace for models. Includes models ready for 3D printing.

TF3DM has a large (but sometimes copyright breaking) collection.

WireCase is chock full of models.

Renderman is a great site and they even have 128 Pixar textures!

Animation rigs can be found at Animation Buffet and Creative Crash. If you know of better places please let me know.

This experimental model stuff could be promising.

NASA has free to use 3D models of their physical creations!

There is always blender, which you’re going to love.

A bunch of shaders can be found at ShaderFrog.

Notes on creating art

So you want to make your own art, eh?

Here’s a programmer’s guide to creating art for your game.

Check out Pyxel Edit for your pixel-art creating needs.

Turn photographs into pixel art at Super Pixel Time.

Some resources on improving your art skills:

New to art?

For an introduction to making game art check out this discussion about 2D art on OpenGameArt.org.

Here’s a massive list of tutorials in from Game Artist Forums.

For people starting out in the world of art, here are gifs that demonstrate how parallax scrolling works (via this reddit thread):

Click to enlarge and animate.

Click to enlarge and animate.

Map Editors

Tiled is a great 2D map editor for creating top down, isometric, and side scrolling levels.

OGMO is Windows-only toolset for creating levels.

The Fantasy World Generator is free and is exactly what you think it is.

ProFantasy Software has a selection of tools for sale to build worlds, campaigns, and cities.

Icons

Icons are things like menu images and elements of the heads-up display for your game. They are used extensively in RPGs.

The NounProject has simple free icons.

Game-Icons has a good collection too!

Video

If you need video for your project you should check out the Prelinger Archive. They have a large collection of films in the public domain.

 

Fonts

Fontspace

 

Other

Image glitch experiment.