Aislyn Hall: How to hire artists and provide art direction
In my blog posts, I like to tackle the topics and questions that come up time and time again. I often see first time Kickstarter creators asking questions about art — who to hire, where to find artists, and how much to pay them. I am fortunate to not have to worry about these things because I do my own art, so I invited Aislyn Hall to talk about her impressive experience and journey in creating Ivion.
Tell us about yourself, your team, and the game you successfully funded on Kickstarter.
Hi! My name is Aislyn Hall, and I’m the creator of Ivion and founder of Luminary Games. I work with a team of five others who work on and off to bring the game to life. I love playing tabletop, video games, and thinking about how awesome paladins are in Dungeons and Dragons. I mostly handle design, some development, and the art direction.
Ivion is a tactical dueling card game where players make decks that represent their character on a 4 by 4 tile field of battle. Each deck is constructed from 2 ‘Classes’ and 1 ‘Specialization’, leading to a huge amount of variation in strategy and play styles. The goal of the game is to reduce your opponent’s hit points to zero!
How many unique pieces of art are in Ivion?
There are 294 unique cards, and thusly, 294 unique illustrations, plus various location illustrations. That’s a huge amount of unique cards to include in a game, especially each with their own detailed commission!
What made you decide that it was worth commissioning so many individual pieces as opposed to re-using the same art across different cards?
One of the main features of Ivion is its theme. Succeeding as an expandable card game is really hard in this established market, and the big companies have a solid grasp on potential customers. To enter that category of game, you have to really present yourself in a big way. We took the route of making our game vast. Right out of the first box, there is a massive game to explore. With a unique illustration on each card, Ivion gains a lot of luster. Each deck is flavorful — you can picture how your specific character is fighting, and it really sells the experience.
How did you find the artists that you decided to work with? How did you decide whether a particular artist had the skills, the style, and was reliable/easy to work with?
At first, the only real lead I had was DeviantArt. I had trouble finding artists that matched the styles I was looking for. I got a tip about ArtStation, and that changed the way I looked for artists. It’s a professional website with a nice layout. I would highly recommend it! I primarily used the search parameters near the middle-right of the site’s front page, changing ‘All Subject Matter’ to ‘Fantasy’.
I searched through it — sometimes for hours a day — looking for the perfect fits for Ivion’s thematic style. It took a long time, but there are a lot of great artists waiting to be hired on ArtStation.
Ivion’s style was based off of Guild Wars 2, but pretty quickly developed its own direction under the guidance of Wojtek Depczynski’s incredible art style. I looked for artists with broad strokes, capable of adding splotchy colors to fill out illustrations, and those with a great deal of talent in creating motion in their illustrations.
It was tougher to find out if they’re reliable and easy to work with — for most, I would give them briefs. If they delivered it in a reasonable amount of time and were open to suggestions, I’d continue to work with them. There were definitely times where I feel I failed to communicate effectively, or vice versa, and it was hard to reach a final result. If things didn’t go smoothly, it was always possible to search for another artist. Most of the artists I have the pleasure of working with carry themselves professionally and deliver fantastic content,
Speaking of professionalism: Be professional while working with your artists (and in general)! Know what you want in your art, and communicate that with brevity and clarity. Accomplishing this helps to avoid frustrating situations for both sides, and leads to higher quality artwork, which everyone wants!
What was your budget and how did you find artists that matched both your budget and art requirements? There’s the old adage: Fast, Good, or Cheap. Pick two. Did you find you had to compromise on something to meet all your goals?
That adage definitely applied! Hiring professional artists to illustrate 294 cards is not a cheap endeavor. We could afford to pay our artists about $100 per illustration, which is still ~$30,000. I’d say I picked good and cheap, compromising on fast. I didn’t rush my artists. I let them work at their own pace, and gave them new art briefs when they were ready. Overall from start to finish, the whole process took about a year, which is about 1 illustration every 28 ½ hours. Near the beginning it was very slow. As I became more comfortable and I worked consistently with the same artists, it was easy to communicate and get briefs done faster, as well as logistically manage more artists to ensure everything turned out well.
Why did you choose to work with multiple artists as opposed to one single artist?
That’s a great question, because there are many upsides to working with a single artist to ensure the vision of the game is coherent. It’s reasonable to expect an illustration once per week per artist, give or take a few days, depending on the person. When hiring an individual for all of the artwork, it’s possible that they could work faster.
294 unique illustrations is too much for one person to handle in a reasonable amount of time, especially with the commission price I could offer them. There was no other option with that many cards other than to work with multiple artists. Over the course of the entire project, I worked with 23 artists. Luckily, I’d say that Ivion is a game that benefits from the menagerie of art styles. Each is coherent and guided enough to fit within the theme of the game, while different enough to show us the world through another beautiful lens. I’m really happy how well that turned out.
What did you do to make sure that the art was of the same style and consistent across different artists?
This was a tough one that I spent a lot of time on guiding artists in the right direction. I chose one of my first artists to begin working on the project because, out of all the artists I had found, his style struck me the most. I then worked with him to produce about a dozen illustrations before bringing others into the mix.
Beyond that, there are three things I provided to ensure consistency with each artist and each illustration:
- I provided a two-three page summary of the motifs of that character type to create a verbal basis of how they fit into the world.
- I provided as many examples of previous work as I could to help paint a literal picture of how previous artists had interpreted this.
- I wrote specific art briefs for each illustrate with aspects of the above motifs clearly defined.
Each of those three aspects helped the artists know what I was looking for, and allowed them some leeway to add their own flair to the project. As more illustrations came in, it became easier to guide artists, as more sample material was present to work off of. In the end, the artists ended up using a lot of the visual examples to garner a feel for the game, and it became quite easy to instill the themes of Ivion and get work started.
What does the process of working with an artist look like? What does a creative brief look like? How often do you have checkpoints? Do you start with concept sketches?
When working with a new artist, I make sure that the terms of working are clear (fun legal stuff), the price is set, and that revisions are acceptable if necessary. Receiving a sketch from an artist that I haven’t worked with frequently is important. When working with one that I’ve already received quite a few commissions from, I generally don’t bother to waste their time with checkpoints. They can work by themselves and deliver when they’re ready with questions regarding direction or any other concerns they may have.
I picked up a few tips and tricks on formating the prompts for briefs, but learned a lot along the way. Over the year of the art for Ivion being produced, it received a few modifications. Here’s what one of the last art briefs looked like:
Card Name | Looming
Setting | The Skels — a harsh, Nordic themed land. Make sure characters fit within this aesthetic.
Color(s) of Card | Red — always shape the atmosphere and dominant colors of the illustration based on the in-game color definition of the card, but keep in mind that these illustrations will be printed on physical cards, and thus will be darker than they appear digitally.
Character Type | Ancient (I link them to a style guide for that specific character)
Location | The stone walls of a keep. An endless forest can be seen off in the distance.
Characters | A warrior stands upon the keep walls. A gargantuan ancient is beyond the keep walls.
Action | The warrior looks up, dropping his sword and shield. A gargantuan ancient is looking down at him, towering over the keep walls.
Here is the work in progress:
…and here is the final product!
Some of the artists you worked with did not speak English as their primary language. Were there some challenges in working with them?
I think most were used to working with clients that spoke English, and had experience interpreting and implementing it via that language. However, there were times where language got in the way of producing what I was looking for. One of these situations stood out a bit more than the others…
We posted that on the boardgames forum on reddit, and we got a huge response — way more than we expected. I actually didn’t even realize there was a miscommunication at first. Here is the first version I received:
It was very strange, but I could sort of make out these massive vines moving around. I tried to communicate with him to make those vines more prominent, but it just ended up making things weirder. Or cooler. Or more hilarious, depending on how you look at it.
It was partly my fault, because at that point I was writing commissions in a vague and awkward style. After that incident, I quickly learned to be very clear and to the point, especially while working with international artists!
How much of the art did you have completed at the time of the Kickstarter campaign launch? Would you say that was a good approach or did wish you had done it differently?
There are many things I would have done differently, and will do differently, in another Kickstarter launch. I can’t recall specifically, but I believe we had around ~150 illustrations complete when we launched on Kickstarter. I wish that we had more done (and had the mechanics more sorted out) before we were on Kickstarter, as it ate away at our time between the completion of the campaign and our original estimated delivery.
I think, ultimately, due to the nature of the project and the financial situation we were in at the time, seeking funding on Kickstarter at that period of completion was for the best. However, from here on out, it’s certain that we’ll have a project at least 90% completed before going to Kickstarter. We may, however, leave 5–10 commissions open for streaming while the Kickstarter is live to give our fans some insight into the process and build some excitement for the coming content!
What were some of the lessons learned and how would you change the way you did your art for the next campaign?
I think the main point that I learned was to be clear and precise while working with artists, but don’t overload them with specifics. Establish the theme of the illustration and the major moving pieces, but let them handle the specifics. They love their craft, and want to make stunning artwork. As long as the aesthetic is provided and they have the skill, they’ll deliver. The best you can do is to give them a healthy prompt, and go with the flow.
It was hard to let go like that and stop nit-picking each minor detail. Illustrations don’t turn out exactly how I envision them in my head, but that’s okay! Usually, what the artist creates is better than what I could have hoped for. I think it’s important to let them imbue their work with their own creative touch, instead of forcing their hand to extreme specifics. As the project marched on, I think the quality of the art my top artists produced improved as I was less stringent with my briefs.
Something I haven’t tried yet, but expect to be very beneficial is giving my artists access to each other’s work more intimately. I want to let them work with each other actively, and talk about ideas by providing a full roster of illustration prompts that I’m looking for in the very beginning, and allowing multiple artists to work together to bring the vision to life simultaneously.
Do you have any future projects in the pipeline?
We’re still working hard to deliver Ivion: Winterstorm, but we’ve got some exciting stuff brewing. I learned so much while designing Ivion, and I’m applying all of the design lessons I’ve accrued to my new project. It’s a bit too early in the works to talk about, but expect something in 2018!
Any more words of advice?
Don’t undervalue hiring a good graphic designer! A crisp, clear user interface for your game is so important, and can make the difference between an awesome group of mechanics being a confusing mess and a great game.
Thanks for the opportunity to talk about this. It’s something I wish I could have had some more help on, and I hope my experiences offer some insight to those that are undergoing the process, or was a good read for the curious mind!
Also, I love Fantastic Factories, and I can’t wait to get my copy!
Where can people find out more about Ivion?
You can preorder Ivion here, sign up for our mailing list, like our Facebook page, follow our Twitter, Instagram, and Kickstarter, download the Tabletop Simulator deck builder and mod and then join our Discord community for some pick up games!
If you’re in the tabletop game industry and have some worthwhile knowledge to share and possibly be featured on this blog, feel free to contact me.
