Create Art

Graphic artists usually meet on the artwork development forum. This is a great place to discuss new and current Wesnoth art and graphics, and to see what other people are contributing.

Current information for artists is found in the Project section

Getting Started

Graphic Editing Programs

The following is a list of different programs for the major computing platforms which may be useful in editing graphics. Some of these are free, OSS, some are not.

Art Programs

General Information

Unit and terrain art is stored in portable network graphics (png) format. Each frame of a unit animation, and each variation of a terrain is stored as a separate .png file in the "images" subdirectory of wesnoth, and generally these files will be 72 x 72 pixels (the size of Wesnoth's basic hexagon) with an alpha (transparency) channel. When creating your own images, you can test them without overwriting any game data by putting them in your userdata directory (see EditingWesnoth for details on Wesnoth's directory structure).

The game also supports jpeg graphics, which are better suited for story art.

More discussion of art standards, image editing programs, pixel art drawing tips, and the game's art needs can be found on the forum.

Art Tutorials

A series of Art Tutorials are being worked on, which may be of help. These will describe both how to make art fit into wesnoth, as well as giving some tips on art in general. Especially useful is the External Tutorials page which lists some very good art tutorials available on the web.

If you're new to sprite art or just want to play around, the Give Your Hero A Personality tutorial is a good place to start.

Terrain Graphics

The following is information specific to drawing terrain for Wesnoth. Read Frame's "Tiles Tutorial" for a good overview of how terrain graphics work.

Tiles Tutorial - Frame's tutorial describing the process of making terrain tiles in wesnoth, and how they interact with adjacent tiles.
How To Make Seamless Tiles - Eleazar's tutorial on making your terrain tiles seamless. The tutorial is aimed at Photoshop users, but the technique is similar with The GIMP.
Castle Tutorial - A description of how Wesnoth's castle tiles work (needs updating, but useful nonetheless)
Multi-Hex Tiling Tutorial - A description of how multi-hex tiles work.
Editing Castles - Instructions for how to make/edit castles (and other corner-based terrains) using yobbo's GIMP script.

To check what's being done and what needs doing, go here:

Tiles Status - a roadmap/plan of sorts for future work

These describe the system used to specify how terrains behave in game:

TerrainLettersWML - A list of the letters used to represent terrain types.
TerrainGraphicsWML - If you really need to get technical, start here.
Ayin's Terrain Graphics document - If you really, really need to get technical, this describes the terrain graphics WML system in depth.

Sprite Art

The following is information specific to drawing sprites for Wesnoth. These will give you the most specific-to-wesnoth information about making sprites, and are well worth a read.

Creating Unit Art - a list of specifications you will need to match.
Give Your Hero A Personality - tricks for editing existing images, including some clip art.

Inspiration

There is a Graphics Library of art posted on the forum that you can use for ideas and to cut bits and pieces of units. Perhaps the best example of this came from the user neoriceisgood (forum thread).