I don’t know about you, but I like my game art pure. I can’t stand when a good piece of art is ruined by a brand name. So even though the Creative Uncut website isn’t intended for this purpose, I like to get wallpapers from there. How about you?
I didn’t always used to feel this way. Back in the 90s, I was all about the band shirts. But now, I can’t stand brand names on my stuff, even if it’s a great brand. Perhaps the exception would be a brand that serves some social issue.
The same goes for my wallpapers, and my renders for signatures (back when that was a thing). I might be alone in this, but how annoying is it when you have an officially sanctioned wallpaper or screenshot with beautiful art, only to be obstructed by the game’s, or developer’s, name? The whole practice makes me think of some marketing team making sure every object coming out of a project has the brand on it, not realising they’re less likely to be shared.
Take the below image. I’m much less likely to actually use it, due to the “Homefront” text and motto. It’s a dealbreaker.
It’s a wallpaper, man. That space is where your icons should go!
It’s especially grating in games like Dark Souls, when the whole point of the experience is understatement. I also think it’s a lot more effective if the name is simply not there. If anyone is interested, they’ll ask — “What’s that from?” That gives you the chance to say “Oh, it’s from Dark Souls, this great game…”
Say goodbye to the next few hours.
So Creative Uncut is great at hosting art without all that junk in it. There are many pieces of character art, which won’t help much with wallpapers, but there’s also lots of concept art, landscapes and cityscapes, and stylised images. That’s the type of stuff I like.
A lot of the images don’t have dimensions that line up nicely to wallpaper size, but I’ve never really been one to care much about that. It’s nice when it fits perfectly, but that’s overridden by my passion for incredible Souls art.
Those who care about creating their own pieces from existing concept art and the like should also find Creative Uncut to be a great resource.
There’s also the gaming wallpapers subreddit, of course, and 4chan has a wallpapers section which regularly has gaming content but is sometimes (often) NSFW. There’s GameWallpapers, which has different sections for how many screens you have.
Where do you go for your gaming wallpapers?
Comments
11 responses to “Where Do You Get Your Gaming Wallpapers?”
Google images 🙂
But it depends really. Most times i just use my screen shots.
Last 6 months was a missingno layered and tiled.
Before that was just a few kirby dream land power up icons stitched together and tiled.
Right now it’s just a googled non water marked cute lil kirby.
The Google machine.
My current wallpaper is a piece of art from The Evil Within. The spider lady! Grabbed it from the official site I think. But Google is good too.
Yep r/wallpapers for me. Used to use Dead End Thrills a bit too.
Cool, will check out Creative Uncut. I’ve gotten some good ones off Deviant Art a few times.
This is currently on my work desktop: http://droot1986.deviantart.com/art/Mass-Effect-3-Destroyed-Citadel-311084419
Most of mine are from the art posts on Kotaku. I’ve got a crazy/awesome collection of brilliant images now.
Yeah, I get them direct from DeviantArt and Artstation as well though. I’ve recently been trying to find the artist who’s going to be in the next one as a sort of challenge.
http://www.thevideogamegallery.com/ is pretty good for me, some hidden gems in there
I get them from http://www.gamewallpapers.com
They have a massive range and updates almost daily. They also have mobile versions of wallpapers also. It’s not free but it ends up being like $10 a year which is fairly cheap.
Usually from Google image search or Wallhaven.cc. If there’s a logo, I try my best to remove them in Photoshop, if that doesn’t work then the wallpaper is trash
Mostly just google images, but stuff like that homefront wallpaper can be very easily fixed, even in paint, when the text is over white space. I’m not averse to taking a wallpaper if it’s going to take a bit of fixing up, but I definitely agree with not using anything with a name/ logo on it. Also it’s really easy to make your own from simple screenshots/promotional art; what I’ve done isn’t brilliant, but at least it’s not visually busy (An example of something I did for reference, really simple and easy, but much nicer I think than the original screenshot http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=408857023)
My wallpaper site of choice is http://www.thepaperwall.com – a truckload of gaming wallpapers (and others), and can be filtered by screen resolution.