Hey I'm a pro artist and honestly paying me money wouldn't fix the problem.
Part of the problem is that we haven't done enough project planning in some areas of the game. Even if we have a team of artists working full-time we can't get much done if we work on parts of the game that we can't use until we finish other parts.
What's really important is for all of us to figure out some of the basics of Game Play so that we can make some priorities for development and get the programmers and artists working together on
important projects.
For example, I am working on re-designing the GUI but I don't even know how the inventory or skills part of the game is going to work. Are we going to use something like stats "strength, dexterity, stamina..." or are we keeping things simple... "health, mana, and weapons/armor" ?
How about fighting? Or buying, selling, trading?!? Can we trade with other players?
There are a few things we need to settle first, then development and artwork will move quicker. For now, things are going to move slow just because we still haven't figured out some of the basics of the game yet.