Tips for anyone making the art for their game (from a professional artist and designer)
Been creating the art recently for my own card game I'm working on with friends (pictured). We're almost at the stage of announcing and sharing the actual game so I thought I'd share some lessons I've learned along the way alongside some of the art I've worked on for the game!
1. You are your own worst critic.
We often see the flaws in our own art, while the other two guys in my team as well as our playtesters love the art, I have trouble seeing anything beyond flaws or skill gaps I have. I've found to keep my sanity while making art it's important that if other people like the art, to run with it.
2. Choose your battles when it comes to details.
Lets be real, we often see those super rendered artworks the big games have and go yeah I need to do that. A lot of the effort won't be seen when it's printed on a tiny piece of cardboard. If you're doing the art solo, pick your battles, only heavily render the things you want people to focus on. Not only will it help guide the eye, but it will save you so much time.
3. Time limits are your friend.
Giving yourself a time limit to get a piece done in can really help you cut to the chase. I've found giving myself less time makes me focus on what matters in an artwork which overall has saved me easily weeks of time while making this project. Blocking out a night or two to do a full painting I've found has helped heaps in consistently making progress.
4. References help, don't raw dog your art.
There's no shame in using references, even professionals use them. I've found painting these images has been less stressful and tedious when I've just used references instead of trying to raw dog a material, texture or shape straight from the dome.
Another way I've found references to be handy is myself and my team make on purposely 'bad' looking artworks that are roughly what we're thinking during playtesting. It helps us refine the art ideas alongside the cards so there's less desicions to be made on the final.
5. Keep colours consistent across factions
Limiting your colour palette and re using similar colours for basic cards in a faction not only creates cohesion and identity, it simplifies and speeds up the process by a lot. I've found sticking to set colours for each faction in my game and only breaking the colour rules for special cards has helped reduce deisicion fatigue.
BONUS: Learn about graphic design. Visual Hierachy, Colour Theory and how design is used to communicate things visually. It helps SO much!
Anyway that's some stuff I've learned from working on this project!
If you have any cool tips to help people give them a share!
