Richard Kain
Hello Calvin, and welcome to the boards. Always nice to see fresh talent. From the sound of it, you're already a pretty good programmer. (you certainly sound confident) The fact that you already have your proposed game diagrammed out, with classes and everything, shows that you know what you are doing. Planning everything out on paper ahead of time is definitely the right approach to take. (helps keep things organized, and breaks the project into bite-sized chuncks that you can tackle one at a time)
As to the art and in-game resources, I'd save that for later, if I were you. I'd start off by using "placeholder" graphics. Simple color blocks for sprites, instead of full painted ones. Gemetric shapes will usually suffice. If you're doing a 3D game, you can follow the same principles. Just use primitives constructed from an inexpensive modeling program. I'd try Blender first. It's free, and has exporters for the DirectX .x format. The important thing is that you construct a working game populated by some graphics. They don't necessarily have to be good. Once you have a proven and running prototype, you can pimp it out to the community, and attempt to recruit a little talent to help you polish those graphics up. There are a considerable number of artists looking to get into the games industry. And one of the very best portfolio pieces is an example of in-game assets. Volunteer work is much more likely to come your way if your game is already up and running well.
The nice thing about art assets is that they can be polished anytime. And if worse comes to worse, and you can't find a little help later, you can always lay down a little money, and purchase a "pack" of in-game assets. There are quite a few of these packages on-line at different sites. Just one of these would probably have enough models, textures, sprites, etc... for one game, and they generally go for $100 or less.
For now, just concentrate on getting your game running and populating it with simple graphics / sounds. Keep the community appraised of your progress. If people get excited about your efforts, it should be easy to get a few artists to contribute some work.