The Card Game on the Cradle: Allegory, Johannes van Wijckersloot

Last week we used Python to generate color palettes for cover images on itch.io. In the weeks before that we analyzed 10 years of game jams, and tug of war mechanisms.

Time for a break from data visualizations and code! Let’s talk about public domain art in tabletop games!

Public domain art is awesome. If you are just starting out, you might not have much of a budget for custom art. Perhaps you are making a historical game, and want to use period art as part of the theme. In both cases, public domain art is a possible option!

With some minimal work, a public domain piece can be touched up to work quite nicely in a variety of formats. Here’s the original Monstrous Pig of Landser from The Met, converted to black and white, and levels adjusted:

The Monstrous Pig of Landser, Albrecht Dürer, ca. 1496

A little more work, and that would easily fit in a TTRPG zine!

But first I feel like a small disclaimer may be in order…

Public Domain, Open Access, CC0… the world of public domain art and licensing can be confusing. This post is not a comprehensive guide to the distinctions between licenses, nor does it cover the differences in public domain law between various nations.

For example, consider The Deluge by Francis Danby (1840), part of the Tate Collection.

You might recognize it from MÖRK BORG:

The Deluge, Francis Danby, 1840

The Tate Collection says their images are released under a Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND license. This means that you must include attribution, you can’t use it for commercial purposes, and you can’t remix/transform it into a derivative work.

And yet, you can find The Deluge on Wikipedia with the following note:

So Wikipedia says The Deluge image is in the public domain based on laws in the United States, but that may not be the case in other countries.

It’s complicated, and I’m not an expert in this.

Instead, this post is simply a list of some of the resources I consider to be most helpful when trying to choose art for a project. I am not a lawyer. If you plan to use any art, be sure to follow all applicable licenses and local laws.

The Public Domain Review opened my eyes to the wide variety of public art that is available. Essays, collections, and more, this is less a repository of public domain art than it is a “exploration of curious and compelling works from the history of art, literature, and ideas.” A fantastic place to browse on a regular basis and get inspiration. This site began my love of woodcuts from the early modern period.

Since 2017, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met) has made “all images of public-domain artworks and basic data on all accessioned works in its collection available for unrestricted use under Creative Commons Zero (CC0).” It’s now one of my favorite sites to just browse art and enjoy the images. The search filters are useful, and the image downloads are usually high resolution. Be sure to filter the result to only show Open Access images.