Chapter Heading Line Art

I loved the art at the beginning of each chapter in old Science Fiction paperbacks. It might be a scantly clad girl sitting on a rock with two huge moons in back that has little to do with the chapter.

I have found 3 Artists to do some simple line art and all three backed out, can anyone recommend an artist that will not back out nor charge an arm and a leg?

 

That's sounds like something you could try Fiverr for, or maybe DeviantArt.

Or go on Shutterstock or other stock photo site and search the vectors collection for the kind of images you're looking . I used little graphic icons from there for the scene separators, or fleurons, in my print book. They're available maybe 9 to 16 to a page, collectively charged as one image.

Like this:

 

I find mine on depositphotos aka I use premade art being sold as stock photos. You could look around some stock sites and see if you find anything.

 

I don't think vector art quite matches what I think SFC Donnell is looking for. The OP specifically mentioned "line art," and vector art I have seen never measures up to the line quality of old pencil or pen-and-ink line drawings. Art (and, more specifically, black-and-white) was my undergraduate major in college. It's a personal quirk, but I don't like "art" produced by vector graphics programs. It generally looks much too flat and lacking in personality.

 

I've found all kinds of art on stock photo sites, not just vector. Watercolor, digital photo manipulation, computer generated things, drawings, etc.

 

I have no idea about that. All I know is that little graphics at the heads of chapters or between scenes need to be as flat and simple as possible. Otherwise they can get muddy in printing. Drawings sound like illustrations to me and are something else altogether.

 

This is very true. I'd reserve the kind of thing the OP speaks of for the print version. I used the vector fleurons in the paperback, but stuck to a single dingbat for the ebook.

 

Thank you all so much for the replies, any help is very much appreciated. I had a friend and we took like about 10% of the photos needed for the chapter art but she got sent to Iraq before we could complete the needed 64 pictures. So I have been looking to finish the art since then. I could do the art myself but my skill set is fair at best when it comes to art. I will expand my hunt for the art.

 

So you have 6.4 photos so far?

When you say "we took like about 10% of the photos needed," what does that mean? To me, that suggests that you went to museums or art galleries or you opened books, and that you took photographs of line art drawings. If that's the case -- remember that unless it's very old art work, it's probably covered by some sort of copyright.

Can you post one or two examples of the images you have so far, to give us a better idea of the style you're looking for? If your friend actually drew the 6.4 images you have to date, I would be concerned about changing to another artist now. Or, if you change, be prepared to start over. Maybe the average reader wouldn't notice but, for me -- coming from a background of art and graphic art, if the artwork on some chapters has a different style from other chapters, that would be a jarring element to me.

An alternate, I suppose, would be to consciously mix three or four styles or artists as you go through the chapters.