I wanted to drop a quick plug that will benefit OpenGameArt, OSARE (my game project), and especially user Justin Nichol.

Announcing the Creative Commons Fantasy Portrait Marathon!

Justin is taking pledges towards creating 30 high-quality fantasy portraits.  They will be featured in OSARE as PC portrait choices or story-line NPCs.  Additionally these portraits will be uploaded to OpenGameArt under CC-BY-SA and GPL licenses.  Finally, these pledges will help Justin attend his next semester at Concept Art Academy in Pasadena.

A $50 pledge gets you a fantasy portrait in your likeness!  Maybe you'll even be the first vendor, quest NPC, or villain of OSARE...

See some of Justin's other high-quality portraits here on OpenGameArt:

http://opengameart.org/content/post-apocalyptic-woman-1

http://opengameart.org/content/post-apocalyptic-woman-2

And his portfolio: http://justinnichol.blogspot.com/

Those of you who follow my blog posts (yes, both of you) are probably aware by now that I'm a big fan of HTML5 and all the awesome potential that it has for the web (like, say, superseding Adobe Flash).  Today, I'd like to direct your attention to Gaurav's WIP old-school RPG, which uses a lot of art resources from right here on OGA.  It's still an early demo at this point, but there's a lot of potential there, so it's work checking out.  This is definitely a project to follow. :)

Gaurav is currently looking for a 32x32 treasure chest sprite, so if you'd like to help him out, please reply to his forum post.

Terry Hancock posted an article for Free Software Magazine entitled 7 Things We Don't Have to Invent for Animation Production (Thanks to Free Software and Previous Free Culture Productions).

He mentions OpenGameArt as one of many useful resources for animation production.  My own low-poly human models get a name-check and screenshot.  Woot!

It's a big "thank you" to the OpenGameArt community and all its contributors, as well as the free-software, open-content-license community as a whole.

Terry Hancock is part of Anansi Spaceworks and is working on the free content licensed project Lunatics!, a "a new animated series being produced by Anansi Spaceworks which will follow the first true extra-terrestrial colonists in their new life in a Lunar Homestead."

It was pointed out to me the other day that it might do us some good to expand our forums a bit in terms of the number of discussion topics available.  Obviously, our forums aren't going to be everything for everyone, as OGA has a very specific aim, but it's also true that there are a lot of areas that pertain to game art (particularly relating to FOSS) that we aren't really touching on.  So, here's where I need you guys:

If you're looking to participate in OGA but you're not quite sure how, we're looking for ideas for new forums, particularly from people who would be willing to become the maintainers for those forums.  This would essentially entail keeping an eye on your designated forum and making sure that any questions asked there are answered, as well as generally participating in the conversations there.

So, do you have a skill that you'd like to talk about and pass on to the community?  Just reply to this post or stop in and find me (BartK) or one of our other editors on OGA's IRC channel!

Edit: If you check out our forum section, you'll see that a number of new forums have been added.  If you'd like to become a forum maintainer for one of those, please let me know.  We're also willing to set up a game project forum for you (like we've done with OSARE) if you have a relatively active project and are looking for a place to host a forum.  Finally, if you don't want to take on the responsibility of maintaining a forum, but would still be willing to answer questsions on a particular subject, post a comment in the appropriate forum(s) and let people know that you're lurking. :)