So the official board's got one of these, and I know we can't upload images on this board, but why the heck can't we have one? We should share some of our favorite inspirations, y'know?

I know, I know, that means having to click links. Sorry.

Racrufi.com - This artist's gallery made me think up this thread. I was browsing for some inspiration for some Aztlan / Aztechnology based characters, and stumbled onto this through dA. Very cyberpunk-forward, Latin American art - every piece I've come across I've loved.

Banksy. Either you love him or you hate him. Me? Love him.

David Mack. Here's a Wiki on the dude, and his most famous series, Kabuki. Tehana got me into him.

And my Shadowrun favorites on deviantart.

Tweould be nice if this could stay on the front page.
Awesome Links Ravensmuse... Thanks

I was just saying the other day we should get Christopher Shy on the payroll.

That is awesome, 3278! Good and creepy stuff.

Nice selection! I'm always looking for more Shadowrun art to use for games, thanks.

A lot of this stuff is pretty good-I especially like the Christopher Shy stuff.

Found these while digging through images on Tumblr this evening. Very impressed!

Bull started this thread in "The Other Forums".

Needless to say, as bored as I usually am, I post there. A lot.

One of my favourites is Raben-aas but i think most people here already know him.
My new all time favourite is the Trog of war he made it into our game so that my rigger decided to play through the latest DLC instead of pimping her ride with the new sensors which were missing in the rest of the run and part of reason she fucked up.

{No Longer An Issue}

Corrected, thanks for the hint.

1, 2, 3.

I think people around here have seen this dude's art before, but if not, you're in for a treat -

Hardcore
Beneath the Neon City
What Will Be After (Chicago, anyone?)
Hostile Takeover
Rain (This one's my favorite)

Website

Wow that guy has talent.

Threads like these make me sad because it makes you realize how crappy the vast majority of published SR art is. There are so many talented artists out there (like Okon) but we get crap like the cover of Conspiracy Theories.

PS: awesomeness

Yeah, as I've stated privately many times, much of SR4th art leaves quite a bit to the anatomical imagination Overextended joints like woah.

There's a parable here that's a common thread in more than just the art...

I want the picture of a box of NERPS four times with different colours.

Hey, where is there some actual NERPS packaging? Can anyone think of any? Do we even know what form they come in? Box, packet, baggie, bottle, tub?

I've heard references to boxes, but other forms of NERPS could come in different packages.

I gotta say, if I were running Shadowrun, every time I needed art I'd just search for Shadowrun on deviantART. For example, is this guy working for us?

No, he's working on an RPG of his own.

The stuff on DeviantArt isn't always representative of what the artist's normal work is like. Go look at the Companion and the Matavarient artwork for an example of what can happen when you hire an artist based on his DA page, and then run into deadline problems.

There's also other considerations... Familiarity with the material (A LOT more important than you might thing), whether or not tehy're capable and willing to take art direction (More uncommon than you might think), whether or not they're capable of hitting deadlines, and most importantly whether or not they're willing to work for the craptastic rates that RPG companies pay.

Plus, whether or not they're available in the first place. Most of the better artists that you guys have linked do work professionally already, usually for video game companies.

I'm personally really happy with the bulk of the art being done right now. there's a few misses, but overall the quality has risen a LOT in the last few years.

Bull

Also, as a note, I've been doing my best to get some of my favorite artists back involved with Shadowrun. I know I pretty much threatened Brent Evans (our art director) at gunpoint (it was a nerf gun, but still) at Gen Con a couple years ago and told him to sit down and talk with Jeff Laubenstein about art. (Brent didn't actually need any convincing, it was more that he needed an introduction ). I've also been trying to get Joel Biske back involved. I'd LOVE to get Jim nelson back too, but I know he's pretty busy with other projects these days.

I also do point out any cool or interesting artists I find to Brent, and I frequently point him at these threads. So don't take my post above as "nahh, we're too good for those Deviant Artists." I know Brents talked to a lot of these guys already. Often it's a time and/or money issue. A few times he's gotten burned. Brent's very picky about the art, and no one is more frustrated than he is when we're forced to use a sub-par pic.

Bull

These were very nice.

Hiring artists is difficult. Very difficult. Creative types do have some serious issues when it comes to creative flow. There's a reason I decided to drop the professional art path. Artists generally don't work well on commissions and those that do tend to have to fight up hill to get something that has the right feel. I envy those few and far between artists that can take a job and do it well in a short period of time. Trust me, there aren't many of them. And hiring dA artists? Yeah, not a good idea. That's where I met my husband.

The other thing is that a large number of artists are now digital artists rather than traditional artists, so you get some stuff that generally people aren't used to seeing. I'm a traditionalist but can appreciate good digital art when I see it. There isn't enough of it. The temptation to take shortcuts is great. The reason it looks unimaginative is because many times it is. Digital art has the ability to place stock items and objects under the details and alter based on that.

On the other hand there are really talented digital artists out there that deserve all the credit in the world.

tl;dr I think that the digital art thing has thrown off people that are used to seeing traditional art. My favorite SR art has always been the black and white line based drawings throughout 3rd edition works. I find them to be understated and well executed in all the proper ways. Its not exceptionally fancy, but its certainly is the right feel and it is really well done. Its about the execution, not about getting the most interesting image possible.

Example: one my favorite pieces of gaming art is the large Steve Prescott image on page 50 something of the SR3rd core. Simple, easy and well executed. That's all you need.

No one thinks you can just hire an artist based on their portfolio and get perfect results, but this seems like a helpful mechanism for finding new artists; obviously you have to select and shepherd and so on after that, but 20 years ago there wasn't a place you could see several thousand artists and search for the content of their art with keywords.

And sometimes it's an exact example of the work a person can do.

I mean, hell, look at the hack writing I do.

I was being serious. When dA first started it was intended to be a place like you are speaking but it's evolved into a social media site. I'll be an elitist and say that 99% of dA is crap. I really have grown to dislike what it has become.

The other issue of what you're speaking of is that you're transmitting information completely digitally. Colors, shapes and resolutions are all lost in the digital format. Things read different from one computer to another and there are large differences in how each person sees something based on the device they are looking at it through. It might seem trivial but a small skew of the monitor can cause severe issues with basic anatomy, color scheme, mood and tone. The entire composition of an image can be thrown off with one detail.

That said, I'm a firm believer that you need to see things in person, digital or otherwise to be able to judge what it truly is. Art shows at conventions seem like the easiest and most effective way to do this.

I really *REALLY* dislike the idea that dA be used as a way for finding artists, and that's coming from an artist.

I don't think this can be overstated. The art serves an important role in fleshing out the game world in ways the text can't, so it needs to reflect the world appropriately.

Plus, we have so much more to bitch about when the art shows wonky stuff...

How does that matter when it comes to finding artists? Obviously, it means you have to wade through more dross to find the good stuff, but does that mean that you're not going to be able to find good stuff with wise use of keywords?


I'm a musician. Your speakers aren't the same as mine, and the difference between them is drastic. But if you listen to my music over your speakers, you'll at least be able to get a sense of what sort of music it is, and see if maybe I'll fit in your string quartet; you can make this basic, beginning, initial judgment even though you're not hearing half [or more] of the music. As a musician, do I wish everyone who were judging me had studio monitors? Sure, but they don't, so that's something I either have to adjust for [most of this art's going to end up digital, anyway, right?] or just live with.

Again, I'm not proposing you see someone's art on deviantART and hand them a thousand dollars to make you some art. I'm saying it's a helpful way to find artists, and while perhaps differences in monitor display can distort artwork somewhat, you can still get a sense of what someone's capable of by viewing their portfolio. It won't tell you how they are with deadlines, how well they can take direction, or even necessarily what they're capable of this week, but it's a better place to start than...


That would be great, I agree! Unfortunately, being able to see and sort through hundreds or thousands of artists this way would be prohibitively time-consuming and expensive [and you could miss anyone who doesn't have the money to go to the shows!], so it seems like the use of online portfolios to pick, say, your top 20 prospects, who you then go see the prints of, would be more efficient.

Nothing would make me happier than if people only judged my music while listening to it on my monitors, but I think that might also be a little artists' pretension, thinking that the differences in speakers are really that important to the quality of what I've done. If I'm to be honest, I have to admit they can learn a lot, even hearing it in a non-optimal condition.

Your titles make me wince, but the flow's good.

I get your point. You see it as the door being opened to a wealth of artists that could potentially be worthy? Or am I reading incorrectly?

It could be, it really could be, but its not as effective as that sadly. I am a traditionalist artist. Very traditionalist and bias against this way of finding artists because I've been a long term user of dA (Around 10 years) and have been involved in the professional artist scene (Abstract traditional painter). The art scene just doesn't seem to work well like that. I wish it would, it's why dA was originally started. I joined dA during college because that's where we were putting our portfolios. It was the wild west days of the internet (At least compared to now) then and we figured that any publicity was better than none. This was encouraged by my college, DAAP, which is one of the more significant art colleges in the country. It was a viable option then, but sadly it didn't pan out as many had hoped. Are there success stories about dA? Sure, of course there is. Just like musicians being found on MySpace, but it doesn't work as well as any of us hoped because of a myriad of issues.

You have two people stating that finding artists on dA doesn't work, one a client that has seen the inner workings of what happens when you hire someone based on their digital portfolio and another an artist that has been involved on dA since the beginning. I wish it worked, I really do but there are way too many variables as far as art and commissions for it to be a viable option for a gaming company in my opinion.

ETA: I forgot. There's also a nice thing that dA does (Or at least did. I quit uploading work there after this), where in their TOS is the agreement that they hold usage ownership over your work every time you upload. So while they might not use any of it, if you do upload something and then sell the work, dA can claim a cut of the profit, especially if you sold it through their site. There's also a gross amount of art theft that runs all over that site. Needless to say, my gallery has been pulled for many years. There's a dark and dirty side to dA.

I don't see how it can be worse than what we've had at times. But then, I don't work in the field of hiring artists. So what do I know?

As a consumer? I would have rather had no art in RC than the metavariant art that is in there. I can dig up photos online of things, I like it in print, but if it's not good I'd rather it not be there. I don't see why you should spend money on cruddy art instead of developing more material. If its good art that adds to the world that's great, but if finding artists to do good work for the price offered is difficult (Which I imagine it is) then I'd be more apt to leave it out.

I get what you're saying, and I think it has merits-but I imagine as a publisher it'd be maddening. To have fans on all sides screaming, and no clear consensus or path to victory. Not to mention, and not to pick on you Tehana, but you and I clearly have very different ideas of what "good" or "quality" art is. How does the people selling the game decide which of us to listen to?

Totally true! Without a doubt. Its a tough decision to make either way. I don't really think I'd ever like to SR (Or any game for that matter) without art completely. Not only would it be tragic to see just black and white text, it would also do nothing for sales. Cover art sells (or doesn't sell) books in one way or another. An attractive cover will help to gain attention so that a potential consumer wants to open and then purchase that item. So to take out art completely would be ignorant in every meaning of the word for a publisher. That said, quality over quantity would be my first approach.

But I'm not an art director. There's a reason I'm self employed. I demand too much out of others (Case in point), which isn't right and is a large bias on my part. At least I can admit it?

Well, as they're supposed to make you wince, that means I've done the job right.

As I've said a few times: IF I SUFFER, EVERYONE SUFFERS!!!

Also, I do know I have very high expectations, ones that aren't common to most Shadowrun consumers. I do notice when a shadow is going the wrong direction or when a bone is incorrectly placed. It's annoying to say the least, and I know its a total flaw of mine. I try to give most gaming art the benefit of the doubt, because honestly its about the essence of a piece rather than the bones in many cases. I just think deep down its not hard to produce work that is attractive and believable. When you start allowing mistakes is when you start to lose credibility.

I'll put it this way. When I look at SR4 art and see major anatomy problems (Which much of it has) it's like finding grammatical mistakes. You don't send a copy to press with spelling and grammar issues. For me, you don't send a piece of art to press with issues that construe believably (Things like anatomical issues, light, composition, etc.). You have to maintain the credibility of your subject along with the world. Shadowrun does this through art and text.

Well, you shouldn't but it still happens. Often. I took a News Editing course back in the day when I was young and filled with the belief that newspapering could make you money (read: very stupid).

Not once did we need to manufacture copy to edit - final proofs of newspapers from the local rag to the NYT or WaPo gave us all the editing practice we needed.

@Canray: Go write more stuff for the ezine.

I'll be honest: I could care less how the art measures up technically as long as aesthetically it's pleasing. If it fits the mood of the game I can forgive a lot. I don't expect my life to be changed by art in an RPG. I just want something that feels right when I flip the page.

Yeah, I see it as a repository of art that's searchable by keyword: some of it's "good," some "bad," some by artists who are dicks, some by artists who can do work very different than what's on the site, etc. It's a huge lump of art, with all the pros and cons that come with that.

Most significantly, there's no gatekeeper, so you have to do a lot of the filtering yourself; this is analogous to a record industry rep needing to wade through 1,000 shitty songs on MyFaceTube, but this isn't significantly worse than going from bar to bar on Saturday nights hoping for the best: sure, the bar owners did some gatekeeping, but not necessarily the gatekeeping you'd have done. Besides, the ability to at least start sifting through the mass [so you can pick who to go see in concert] while you're at your house, nude and prostrate, cannot be discounted!

Do these online garage demos sound like a band's final studio demo? Of course not: they sound like shit, mostly [although the availability of consumer-price professional-quality tools is changing that, in both artistic arenas]. Can you tell if the lead singer's a drunk, or if the drummer is going to die in two weeks from a car accident? Definitely not. But it's still a useful tool to begin searching, if you know how to filter well.


I'll pretend that you said "experienced with" instead of "biased against." I may find myself in the position of needing to locate a number of exceptional cyberpunk artists in a relatively brief period of time, and your experiences - even your biases - could teach me a lot, so I'd prefer to think of you as well-informed, rather than biased.


Other than the limitations of looking at art in a digital format, and the issue of gatekeeping, what are some other of the myriad issues you perceive? Again, remember that I'm not suggesting you find your artists on deviantART [or any other particular online portfolio], only that it's a useful way to begin the search. I wouldn't sign an artist based on their YouTube video, but its global reach, search indexing, and popularity-voting make it a useful tool in a recruiter's arsenal. If I were looking for cyberpunk artists tomorrow, I'd check online portfolios: I can't see any reason I'd reject that tool outright.


This all seems very deviantART-specific, and that's fine, but I'm not necessarily suggesting that particular site over any others: I'm endorsing the utility of online portfolios. If dA is sometimes shady, than that's useful information for me to know, but it doesn't make it a not-useful tool or concept if you're looking for artists, any more than Flikr isn't a useful tool if you're looking to find photographers! Sure, maybe those photographs wouldn't reach their full potential unless I saw them printed on metallic paper. Sure, maybe the photographer is great at taking pictures they want but can't shoot on commission. Sure, maybe the photographer is a compulsive nail-biter with no fingers left who takes pictures with his nose. Flikr can't tell me that. What it can tell me is, "Hmm. Those are some pretty decent photgraphs. Check out the composition in these portraits, and the framing on these action shots. Nice work drawing focus with the depth-of-field. Clever visual puns there, too. Can we find out who reps this lady?" When the alternative is, "Goodbye, dear, I'm going to spend the next six months touring art fairs and looking in booths," I think Flikr looks pretty useful as one tool in my arsenal.


And I value your experience, which I cannot personally replicate. I don't want to dismiss those experiences out of hand, I just don't understand the reasoning behind some of the objections shared by both you and Bull.

Bull's objection seems primarily to be that just looking at a bunch of some dude's art isn't necessarily representative of what you'll get if you pay him to make you some art, and I absolutely agree that's a challenge: so what's the alternative, in terms of looking for artists? Talent reps? Art shows? Aren't you going to run into that same problem no matter what you do, such that you're going to want to look further into the artists' references before hiring them?

Your objections seem primarily to be, a) no gatekeeping, and, b) the limitations of the digital medium. The first is a limitation I accept - I don't mind flipping through 10000 thumbnails and visiting 10 art shows, versus just travelling to 100 art shows - while the second doesn't deeply trouble me, coming as I do from a background of needing to accept that no one is ever going to experience my art the way I created it. Are there other objections to using online portfolios to begin searches for art?

Probably more importantly than any of that, what should I do instead? If I wanted to find artists to create a couple hundred images in a given style or theme, and I weren't going to use online portfolios, what would you recommend I do?

Busy, it's on the list. Along with my Fallout 3 FanFic (Almost done, and it's bloody NOVEL sized!), and starting a new Shadowrun FanFic.

I think we're on the same wavelength here, it is a good portion of gate keeping that frustrates me about deviantArt. I think this might be where the music and art world differs though. In order to book a gallery show you're going to need to first of all #1. Be worth a damn and #2. Know someone. If you can't do that you could presumably do #3. Sleep with the gallery owner (Hey, it's more common than you think.) but generally you still have to be decent to get there even with #3 because the owner is still putting his/her self on the line by booking any show. Any show will be written up by the press somehow, from a local college paper to Art In America, every show gets a review somewhere.

I'm not heavily involved with the music industry to know all the ins and outs. I'm a big appreciator and spent most of my teens and early twenties following industrial bands around the mid-west (I guess I was a groupie?) but that's about as far as my knowledge goes. My experience is that there is a big class differentiation between the typical music industry and the typical art industry. Music is for the masses, art is for the elite. (Something I've never agreed with, but let's be honest here.)

The art "scene" is all about Soho gallery openings with Dom Per and schmoozing. Truly. One of the main reasons I left it is because of this. The gallery life isn't for me. Going to gallery openings and talking to all the right people, getting your picture in Socialite Weekly? Not my thing at all.

Now the music industry to me seems like it's far less formal and at least more inviting for an every day creative type. A "garage" artist isn't ever going to get beyond a local art exhibition, sad but true. A garage band has the ability to get signed and it hit it big, might not happen very often, your chances are nil at best I'm sure, but there's still a chance there.


Thanks, check this out. I found it the other day while floating around Tumblr. Its a good tag.


I wouldn't say that I'm fully against the online portfolio, I just don't think its the best idea and certainly not the way the industry works. I just think something about the art industry will always work better in person, whether that be gallery or art show type of atmosphere. For gaming I think this is really dependent on the convention art show. That said, I've seen some shittastic art at convention art shows. One stands out from 4 or 5 years ago at a Boston area convention. The artist of honor created literally some of the most atrocious and terrible art I've ever seen in my entire life. And that's not just saying I didn't like it, it was terrible. There's bad art, and then there's just *BAD ART*. I know, all in the eye of the beholder and such but truly, this was awful.

But to the point I was making, her stuff didn't look awful in the promotional materials or when you looked at her things online. Something about her photography of her work disguised some very significant issues.

Prior to I'd say, 10 years ago, a portfolio was commonly submitted to whomever in slide format so that it could be projected. The loss of color and skew was minimal because digital manipulation wasn't possible with a physical slide film format (at least not for 99% of people). Its very easy to digitally alter a piece of work with Photoshop as prevalent as it is now. I'm sure its the same thing with the music industry though. With technology comes great risks and all that.

So I think I do have issues overall with a digital portfolio. I know, personally, I haven't ever been able to get photos of my paintings for an online portfolio that I felt were representative of the actual piece. My colors always got thrown off, brush strokes caught light wrong, texture coming out too much or not enough, things like that. May seem trivial but it completely throws off the feeling. I've pulled my entire online portfolio because of this. If I desire in the future to seek employment I'll go through the old gallery scene, as much as I hate it.


I think the best way to think about this is this. You *MUST* judge an artist by his or her absolute worst piece because that is the best you can expect. Part of this is because as a client you have to expect the worst and be pleased with the best. The other thing to think about is that if an artist is willing to put a terrible piece of art in his or her gallery, they're proud of it, and that should be a red flag.

As I said before, for this situation, I think convention art shows might be the best place to make final judgements on artists. I don't think the internet and online portfolios are completely useless when it comes to selecting artists, but I do think that when you're using it as your largest means of material you're going to have some pretty significant issues that come up. Artists are a *VERY* odd breed of people, we need a tight hand over us at all times or else our imaginations tend to run wild, and now we're back full circle to why commissions are difficult

Here, dA good stuff.

I get bored.

OMG. You're my hero right now. I've been searching for an appropriate character portrait for my current character for weeks! And you found it!

Well, it's Echo's work, and in one of the books, so I can't really say I did much.

New to me! Probably wouldn't have found it without ya.

This is definitely an issue you have to deal with when it comes to more-or-less anything online: while you have a much shorter route from you to Bob [and Bob's opinion or painting or research], that route goes through fewer intermediaries whose judgment could be used to curtail access to you from Bob. That's a two-edged sword. Gatekeeping means accepting someone else's judgment, but it also means saving you a lot of time sorting through dross; I could watch HBO or I could watch YouTube, I could listen to the radio or I could listen to Live365.com.


The comparison there, though, is apples and really nice apples. The equivalence isn't from Soho opening to garage band. There's local art just like there's local music, and the gallery openings [generally] don't feature Dom. There are free art shows just like there are free music shows. There are elite gallery openings and there are elite musical performances. Probably the biggest difference is in volume: there are dozens of bands playing some bar for every gallery showing; by the same token, works sit in galleries and shops all week while the band is doing their day job. So the two aren't identical, but from my experience with art shows and gallery openings [only attending; my skills are shockingly poor], and with local-to-regional music [Gauss to Martin Atkins, for some sense of scale], if you're comparing across equivalent levels, they're not terribly dissimilar.


Yeah, see, that's the thing. We're not talking about Soho opening art, here, we're talking about RPG art. Much as I'd like to think the two would intersect, we're not talking about gatekept galleries when we're talking about finding RPG art, we're talking about conventions, and then the gate is monetary: which artist has enough money for the table fee. That'd be like scouting music by only going to see a Battle of the Bands with a $300 entry fee. That's not a quality filter, just a money filter. Or am I incorrect about how tables work at RPG conventions? I've never worked one, just attended, and I assumed they weren't, you know, auditioned for.


That could be a profound failure of the ability to image physical art in a digital medium, but if that's true, then all art online is profoundly, deeply, meaningfully misleading, and I just don't think that's true. When all you're trying to do is sort through 10,000 artists and pick 100 whose works interest you enough to look further, I don't think the kinds of differences you're concerned about are significant enough to eliminate the utility of the concept. And I still think we're probably over-sensitive to the issue of how people perceive what we've created, i.e. tremendously self-important creative types. People listen to my music on computer speakers. Sometimes in mono. Almost never with a subwoofer. It's not even the same thing to me. But for their purposes, it's enough to tell them whether or not I suck.


Final judgment has nothing to do with online portfolios, though, as I envision the process. Final judgment will take place in my studio, or theirs, face-to-face in a quiet room. But I believe there's a role for online portfolios in initial judgments on artists, yeah.

I think I can comfortably agree to agree in part and disagree in another part of our opinions. You've got some seriously valid points, I might not agree with all of them, but I'm willing to admit that most of my issues are my own and it's pretension on my part based on my experiences.

After I wrote my last post I gave it some thought and I do think my experiences aren't particularly relevant in this situation en total. I think I'm probably taking a far more analytical approach to art in general because of the experiences I've had. Being involved in the fine art world has surely skewed my perceptions of art in general. My experience in the art world is very much that of Dom laden gallery openings with snooty drunk old men that try to touch your butt or very off the wall shows with indie artists (Think Amanda Palmer levels of weird). I've been exposed to smaller things on local levels but the majority of my experience is in the high end fine art world. So to say I come from an odd perspective is pretty spot on.

It's not easy after experiencing that world to break out and appreciate art just for its essence so to speak. After you're trained to pick apart every little detail its hard to see the larger picture. As I'm sure is the same with you and music! In other words, I'm the worst person to *EVER* take to a gallery opening or museum. I criticize everything no matter how hard I try not to.

So my perspective isn't really on target here, but I do think there's some validity in both of our points, because, like I said before, I don't think we quite agree on everything but in some odd way I think we might be saying some similar things.