I'm in need of a picture for an NPC and I thought I'd poll the community here. Specifically, I'm looking for something decent to use for a low-level Yakuza thug and, ideally, I'd want it to be an actual photo (he's human). However, I think there's a larger question here... I'll want pictures in the future, I'm sure... So what do you guys use when looking for an image to use for an NPC's face? Maybe my Google Images-fu is simply weak, but I was having no love there. Are there any great repositories? I was thinking about capturing a still from some movie I own, but I don't want to use well-known actors else my players will recognize them. Anyway, any advice would be wonderful. Thanks.


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If you aren't dedicated to having photos (as they can't be easily done into metatypes without some Photoshopping) you can try any of the three art threads on here. Squinky, holychampion, and myself are the three artsists here on the boards. All three of us do artwork on request and would most likely be willing to do drawings for NPCs if you ask.

You can do some cool stuff with Poser (or figure artist), but it's kind of frustrating to pick up initially and pretty expensive for just making pictures of faces.

In a quick pinch, Google Images works fairly decently if you're not going to be too picky. Most of the time you can just type in exactly what you want and get some decent hits (though there's usually some porn thrown in for whatever reason; God bless the internet).

Example Search: "Yakuza Thug" (and bah, see, there's a porn image or two there; what did I tell ya!) Just using "Yakuza" worked a bit better, by the way.

So I don't know why you were having trouble. Here's a few decent examples from the searches:
http://www.nekofever.com/images/yakuza.jpg
http://www.trpg.or.kr/zeroboard/data/pic/yakuza.jpg
http://www.quirkyjapan.or.tv/yakuza1.jpg
http://www.hiromovie.com/high_res/Hiro_Yakuza.jpg

Guess it depends on what kind of pictures in particular you're after. I rather fancy the last one for your classic "thug."

The SR Missions also have some great artwork, done by Squinky, which isn't in his thread here on DSF. Beyond that, if you work with a laptop you can bookmark images on Epilogue.net, pen-paper.net, deviantart and more.

If you're looking for human pictures, or maybe elven ones with the ears kind of hid, try the websites for some of the big catalogs, like Sears and JCPenney. Thousands of pictures of usually gorgeous women (and men, I guess) free for the plucking.

http://www.sears.com/sr/javasr/category.do...UseBVCookie=Yes

http://www4.jcpenney.com/jcp/Department.as...mCatId=HomePage

http://www2.victoriassecret.com/

I ran those two Google searches and found some of what you did. My biggest problem, I guess, is that I need the face identifiable, so promotional stuff from the Yakuza video game (which mostly shows the main character from the back, I guess) isn't usable. Thanks, though, for everyone's advice. I'll have a look in the art threads and man--JC Penny... Never would've thought of it, but brilliant. Thanks, all!


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I like to use:

1. http://www.deviantart.com - quality varies but there is some great stuff there.

2. http://creative.gettyimages.com/source/home/home.aspx - absolutely huge photo archive.

-JKL

I'll second the deviantart.com recommendation. There are a lot more good artists than on elfwood...

Also, I use the forums at cgtalk (don't have the url here) if you like good CG images.

And here is the link for CGTalk.

CGTalk

I've been working with a couple other artists (Tim Keller, Mike Hay, Mike Underhill) to create character sketches and other artwork for my campaign.

Feel free to take a look at the sites listed below.