Hello,

This is a very specific question. I found an awesome picture on an artist's website gallery. Not only would I like to use this picture for an Adept Press publication, but the artist's work is generally so good that I'd like to strike up a project with him.

... all of which is easy as pie and I've been doing it for many years now.

Except that in this case, the artist's webpage consists of nothing except his logo and his gallery. No contact information, no email, not even his name! There's no way actually to open a dialogue.

As far as I can tell, this artist has not been featured in role-playing publications before and is just starting out. The webpage is clearly in development (e.g. one page is blank, awaiting uploads). Unless I miss my guess, we are looking at the classic talented D&Der whose work casually outstrips most pros, and who doesn't know much about marketing it. The kind of guy I like to work with, because doing a ton of stuff for indie games gets his name out there with some clout.

Grrr! It's very frustrating. I could simply wait and see whether the site gets updated with more information (when someone finally tells him, "Dude! Put your email on there!"), but I think we all know that might be tomorrow, or months and months.

Is there an easy solution that I don't know about? Is there some web-savvy thing in IE Options that "everyone knows" you just click on to find out what I want to know? I tried to see the source code, just in case, but it didn't work for some reason.

Don't bug me with obvious stuff. No, there is no webmaster link. There is nothing - just pictures and a couple of pages. He has his own domain name, though, it's not a geocities site or something like that.

Best,
Ron

You can do a WHOIS lookup to find out who registered the domain, and who the contact person is.  This will not be useful in many cases, but if your artist registered it himself, it's a lead. 

http://www.internic.net/whois.html or google "whois" for others; results may vary. 

--Jason

You could try simply emailing something@hiswebsite.com - frequently, smale scale hosting like this redirects all mail to the url to a single mailbox.

As Jason suggested, do a WHOIS.  Even if the artist didn't register it himself, you can probably contact the artist through whoever did -- even if it's just an email forwarded to him.

Try e-mailing him at webmaster@thedomainname.com where thedomainname.com is whatever his domain is; many domains are set up to redirect that address to the guy in charge.

Hey Ron,

I think I know what you're after. The URL in question is not a domain name that he registered. It was provided to him with his internet service account, and is a concatenation of his user account and the service provider. The URL in question looks like this:

www.user.service.com

Try constructing his email address like this: user@service.com

Paul

http://www.betterwhois.com/

This should pull up all the contact info for that domain name. Also,
Administrator@Domain Name
Postmaster@Domain Name
And
Admin@Domain Name
are often set up automaticly by the webhosting provider.

If all else fails, you could try posting inquiries (with a link to the website) at various forums where aspiring rpg artists hang out (rpgnet, epilogue, enworld, conceptart, etc) and see if he responds with a "Hey that's me!" or if someone recognizes his work and can get you in touch with him. Depending on how you stumbled across his site, the place where you heard about it might be a place to look for leads also.

Another idea: do a few web searches for the URL or the name of the site. You may come across forum posts, blog posts, or just someone's link page that has more clues as to the artist's identity.