I'm excited to announce that the first piece of exclusive OpenGameArt.org art has been completed! You can find it here. My eventual goal is to commission various sets of armor, hair, faces, etc, (as well as a female base sprite with similar options) that will allow developers to build sprites to their specifications. For the time being, customizing this sprite will be up to you, the community. Please remember that, since this art is licened under the GPL and CC-BY-SA, you are required to redistribute the source of any modifications you make to it (in this case, any Gimp, Photoshop, or similar files that contain image layers), as well as crediting the original author.

It's been suggested to me that I consider taking donations for the website. I think this might be a good idea, as it would allow me to commission art more quickly, but I really want to avoid it being at all off-putting. If I did accept donations, I would do so under the following standards:

* Every cent donated would go toward commissioning art and/or music (as opposed to server costs, which I cover myself, and in addition to the art commissions I'm already covering myself). This may change if my bandwidth needs skyrocket, but at the moment I've got way more than enough.
* I'll never have any sort of "premium membership" or incentive for someone to donate, except perhaps recognition of doners who would like to be recognized. Since the point of OpenGameArt is to provide art to developers at no cost, any sort of for-pay premium benefit would be counter to what this site is about.

For the record, I have the budget and desire to run this site myself pretty much indefinitely without any kind of assistance. It's just that a bigger budget will bring in more art for the community, so it's worth looking into.

Thoughts, anyone?