I wrote a blog post about the lessons learned from working with artists over the course of 9 years, working on my top down racing game SuperTrucks Offroad.
Hopefully these tips will get you on the right track and save you some money in the long run!
Do you have any tips or lessons learned you can add?
Great read.
Iâd add, for artist, donât work with anyone who isnât this professional ^^^
If you hire and work with an artist, who can do his/her work really, really well:
My suggestion is, donât overwork him/her too much, otherwise he/she, will suffer a meltdown.
Good read!
One thing I would say, having worked as a freelance artist for a while, is that you as the buyer can never provide too much information. I have dealt with some people who seem to think that an artist can read minds, and things didnât work out well. I ended up making a habit of asking loads of questions of new clients, and if they didnât provide good answers or were flippant about things, I said âsorry Iâm not the best person for the jobâ because I knew things wouldnât work out.
If youâre hiring an artist, grab tons of reference pictures and mark/annotate them, provide bullet point lists of every detail thatâs important to you, and above all know what you want and how to describe it.
Great post. Can vouch for every single point in it, based on hiring artists (and coders) for various things over the past ~20 years.
Good stuff that plenty of people need to hear.
The only thing Iâd nitpick in there is the bit about having contractors give you source after payment. If providing source is an expected part of the work then I wouldnât make final payment until I had those files as well.
Good point, but Iâve met a lot of resistance in the past with asking for source before final payment. Most artists want final payment, then will send the source, in my experience. As a programmer I would never release the source until I had received final payment either. So yeah, Iâm guessing thatâs just something that needs to be discussed/agreed to up front.
Yeah, thatâs fair. In my case itâs usually been dealing with local people face to face, so as long as itâs in the contract both sides have a reasonable level of confidence either way because our reputations would be trashed if we didnât keep up our end. Online transactions tend not to have that consideration so much.
If you have well defined milestones and payments at each there shouldnt be a problem for either one party to either pay up front or deliver before payment on that last milestone. I always let my artist use a git I own, not always the real git since its a hustle to make NDA agreements fro every little job, but the git is always in my control. That way I always have the source.
"Now trust me, if you are not ecstatic about something in your game and its your passion project, youâre going to want to fix it and its going to nag the fuck out of you until you doâŚ"
Most def.
thanks for the share, was just about to get started with contracting an artist next week 
All great stuff, thanks for sharing.
I second these Tips! In fact most of these tips can be used for any kind of contracted partner like programmers, writers or musicians.
In addition to Tip 4, you may ask them to store the files on a shared server, I use Dropbox and artists put their work and soruce files into that. If its too big I archive them from time to time on my local storage.
âIf an artist has poor comms or has one line replies to your lengthy emails,â
Oh yea. I had someone who had a nice introduction forum post but once I talked to him I had the feeling he was using a translator and didnât really understand what I wanted. Communication is king!
The advice is applicable to working with anyone from a vet for your cat to a baker for your cake. Communication is not the words you use or the language you speak, but understanding and thatâs a lot harder.
Good tips!
I think this is a great, general read and fair to both the artist and client, with one exception. As a work for hire, you (the client) now own the copyright to the work, which is fine for a typical game project. However, the artist should have some sort of an indemnification clause. Right now, you ask that the artist guarantee all the work is original and does not infringe on anyoneâs copyright. But, if you have given the artist references and/or directed the artist to make it look like âso and soâ, that may be a request that infringes on copyright.
A simple indemnification clause that states that the artist is not responsible for copyright issues when given art direction or references by the client would make this more fair. Right now, if anything good happens with the project (the next minecraft), you are the copyright holder and creator of the work. If anything bad happens (that photo, game, or style you asked the artist to reference), they are the one that is liable.
âA simple indemnification clause that states that the artist is not responsible for copyright issues when given art direction or references by the client would make this more fair.â
I disagree. The way the OP did it, the artist is being told âI like this, but donât violate copyright.â Your way, the artist gets to think, âI can copy these slavishly because itâs not my problem.â
And it absolutely is the artistâs job to not violate the law.
It is every persons job not to violate the law. Why should artist have to go out of their way to ensure client isnât breaking law? Unless it is super obvious violation, it simply isnât feasible. The person giving the orders has the onus to not give bad orders.
Different story if you are hiring an art director. But if you are hiring somebody with intent to tell them specifically what to create, I, personally as an artist, would prefer @Voronoi 's contract.
If the artist is too stupid to avoid violating copyright on reference images then you shouldnât hire them.
If the developer is too stupid to ask the artist to copy copyrighted work, you shouldnât work for them.
I am probably understanding this differently, but what I am imagining is developer gives artist a handful of images and says, âmake stuff that looks about like this.â
If itâs batman and artist just makes it, yeah they are an idiot. If its just random images they havenât seen before, are they expected to spend half a day googling all of it to make sure it doesnât belong to some protected IP?
Personally, if someone else is giving orders and my job is to follow them, I am not gonna work for that person if they are not willing to accept responsibility. If the job entails a higher degree of decision making autonomy on my behalf, then I am willing to accept greater responsibility.
I would agree if the contract was âall rightsâ. In that case, the artist is the author, transferring all rights to the client, but they retain authorship, can show it in their portfolio and say that they did it. In that case, yes, the artist should not be making work that infringes and should guarantee it is original.
In a work made for hire contract, the client is the author. The artist has no inherent right to show the work. Therefore, if the client keeps sending it back saying âNo, make it look more like thisâ and gives the artist a reference, it should not be up to the artist to figure out where that reference came from. The client could literally be instructing the artist to infringe. Work for hire means the artist is simply the hands doing the work, and not the âauthorâ.
I would argue that that contract as written says, âanything good that happens, I am the authorâ and âanything bad that happens, itâs not my work, blame the artistâ.
Thanks for sharing these tips. As a beginner, I am desperate to make a career in 3D game development. I am trying to master Unity as best as I can. Hopefully I will get somewhere.