Hi. I'm looking for a pixel artist to work on an iPhone game. This is a paid position.

Therefore the type of art I'm needing is animated spaceships, weapons, buildings, civilians, explosions, etc. 

Precise details of what I need will be provided, but ideally I'd like an artist with some imagination, one who may come up with addition ideas for enemies and so on.

Most of the core gameplay and programming code is complete already. I've been working with placeholder graphics up until now. It's a matter of getting final artwork complete, creating the stages of the game, tweaking difficulty levels and final polishing to completion.

A little about myself: I've been a professional games programmer for over ten years. By day I work on Xbox360 and Playstation3 games, but I'm developing smaller scale mobile games in my free time for fun. I don't expect to make a fortune from this and so my budget is limited, but I am willing to pay for quality. For my initial games, I'm more interested in finishing the product than creating 'the best game ever', but quality and presentation do matter.

It's been a while since I worked with Pixel Artists over the internet (last time was when I was making AMIGA games!) and I've never paid for work before. Therefore I need some guidance as to rates of pay and how it will be paid. I know there are a lot of time wasters out there and so artists are skeptical of working with non proven developers. I'm not looking to rip anyone off. Ideally I'd like to work with a payment per sprite set, starting with a few simple sets and take it from there.
This is probably going to be very much a part time job for the artist. I'll need a few bits at a time, spread out over many weeks. There are however, likely to be future similar jobs for good artists as well and so may be a continued source of small jobs.

Interested artists please send me a private message with a link to portfolio, expected payment rates and anything else relevant.