[Art] Artist looking for work in RPG industry

FloatingDisc · Aug 28, 2012

Hi everyone,

I'm a semi-professional artist and graphic designer looking to break into the RPG industry. I work in various other fields such as t-shirt, skateboard and video game illustration and graphic design, but my true love has always been fantasy and sci-fi art!

I've been drawing my friends' D&D characters at the table for about 10 years. I work a horrible full time day job designing junk mail, but I dream of creating art for gamers to enjoy rather than throw in the trash!

What I need from the ENWorld community is contacts within the RPG publishing industry. Without these, I'm limited to just cold-emailing publishers - usually their public relations people, who I have to implore to pass my email on to their art director/marketing team. After writing to several companies, I haven't had any responses yet. If I could just send my work to someone in the position to give me a chance at illustrating something fantastical, I know I could do a good job.

So, if you know anyone who works in RPG/fantasy publishing, I will be forever in your debt if you could please direct them to either my blog or my online portfolio. Both have a good selection of my recent work. I have very reasonable rates, and am reliable and professional, and have references who will attest to both.

Thanks for reading, and good gaming!

Floating Disc
(JW Paterson)
J.W. Paterson Art & Design
LIVE FROM THE SNAKE FARM

Hal G · Aug 28, 2012

As a former art director for RPG's let me say a few things:
Not a lot of money in this industry so I am glad you love it.

Emailing art directors is the best way for you to get your name out there, its free!

If you can afford to go to cons make a bunch of disks with your work on it and leave one for every publisher at the con, after GenCon I would have at least 100 portfolio's and disks to go through and this was in 2002.

Find a company that you enjoy and is a company that you may be able to break in with (Not WoTC, Paizo etc) and make some work based on something they did, and send them a few and saw I am in the industry and a fan look what I whipped up.

When putting stuff on your online gallery do not mention any names of companies you have not produced the work for, I saw you mentioned D&D, I know you mean that genre but I would just relist as fantasy/sci-fi.

That is all I can think of now, lack of sleep and need to get up and out prevents me from rambling more.

FloatingDisc · Aug 29, 2012

Thanks so much for your reply, Hal!

I will look into attending conventions, but in Australia there aren't many, and they aren't attended by many US publishers.

Re. emailing art directors, that's really what I want to do, but I don't have any email addresses. I have emailed a lot of companies but there is usually only a generic contact email address, and I just ask them to forward my work on to the art department.

I like your suggestion of doing some tailor-made work for a company and sending it to them - I will definitely try that next!

Thanks again, I really appreciate your taking the time to respond so thoughtfully! All the best, and good luck with The Awakened!

Hal G · Aug 29, 2012

I did not see where you lived, if possible maybe get a friend in the USA next year who is going to GenCon will assist you by dropping off disks of your work off.

Also a lot of companies have a contact link I would just email them and make it attention art director, it won't be easy but if that is what you want to do stay focused and good luck.