I’ve been a big fan of Tony DiTerlizzi. He’s one of the artists I credit for making me want to draw for a living (Brom and Clyde Caldwell being others.) So when he posted a Spiderwick fan art contest on his blog, I had to jump on the opportunity.
Here is the result. Byron eating a baby dragon. 8.5″x11″ Pen brush on bristol, scanned and painted in Photoshop and Painter.
A few years ago I went on two photo sprees in some very large and beautiful cemeteries in Montreal (Notre-Dame des Neiges and Cimetièrre du Mont-Royal) and have been painting from them since. Here is the latest installment. I took pics of the underpainting but the pics came out black due to a camera malfunction.
Here is the step after the burnt sienna underpainting where I have started to put some local color glazes in place.
With a bit of my easel and work space for scale.
Upclose and personnal.
A lot of teams and projects are looking for artists, level designers, audio people, underlings and programmers. A great many of them are looking for collaborators who will work for free, for equity or for share of profit. Is it worth your time to join one? Will it give you useful experience, will it make your resume look better? How does one go about choosing a team or a project?
Here are a few questions you should ask anyone who wants you to get onboard their project (this list is in no way comprehensive.)
What is the scope of the project? As I mentionned in the post 10 tips to attract team members , scope is perhaps the single most important part of building a game and a team. If a team wants to make a game with wildy extravagant scope and their only experience is open beta testing on a match-3 game, what are the odds their game will ever be finished? It’s much better for your experience and portfolio to work on small projects that get finished than on grandiose flops.
What is the aim of the project? While the scope of the project needs to be realistic, it’s aim needs to be as well. With a realistic aim, the team is less likely to get discouraged and drop the project and fights are less likely to erupt about the game failing to reach some teammates’ lofty goals. Let’s make a puzzle game and get rich! is a recipe for disaster, for often, someone will get blamed for the game not being as successful as desired. Will the game be released commercially or is it just a portfolio piece? Are the means proportionate to the aim? Always be clear on the aim of a project before getting started and choose projects that have a realistic aim.
How big is the ”team? The bigger the team, the more chances it will fall appart, smaller teams are easier to coordinate. The thing is, more than the size of the team by itself, you have to make sure that it’s the right size relatively to the scope of the game and the experience of the teammates. Also, sometimes, someone with no or little skill will try to assemble a team to accomplish their vision. Apparently, these individuals think that just having ideas is extraordinary enough to warrant an army of skilled individuals at their beck anc call. Don’t be fooled and choose a team where everyone is pulling their weight.
Now that I gave you reasons to log your time, I should give you some tips on how to do it. Here is the way how I do it. I’m not saying it’s the best way, because it’s not. I’m actually working on improving my log system.
I’m a freelance artist, I usually make a quote on a project for a fixed or very well estimated number of items and then charge a set price. That means that I better have a god idea of the time it’s going to take me to finish or I can lose money, badly.
I usually have a computer folder for each project I work on. In this folder I keep a spreadsheet that relates only to this project. In it, I list the date I started and the date I finished a project as well as the time spent everyday and what I was working on during that time (animations, gui, backgrounds, etc.) Then I use it to divide the money I made by the time it took and see how much I got an hour to see if I should charge more for a similar project later on. It looks something like this:
Tracking billable and non billable hours
Do you track your billable and non-billable hours? If so, how?
My worksheet is awful but when I wanted to update it, I thought that there has to be a better way. My projects range from 5 to 60 hour things and I often have more than one going at the same time, at different stages of completion. I didn’t find a software that allowed me to log my time more conveniently yet.
Also, so far I haven’t been keeping track of my non-billable hours but I’m wondering if it would be worth it to keep track of them to see how much I really DO make an hour. Does anyone do that?
Do you also use the same system to keep track of who owes you what or is that a completely different system?
According to Microsoft, you can use Outlook to track your billable hours, here’s what they have to say about it.
*note: This is an old draft that I wrote to go with this post. I then proceeded to forget about it. I’m posting it on the off chance that it might be useful to some. It might not be complete but I can’t for the life of me remember what I wanted to do with it.*
The game I’ve been working on since February (I came in as the project was already underway) has made it in a Penny Arcade cartoon. Woohoo.
