The art tests of last month didn’t result in jobs, unfortunately, but I think it was good practise nevertheless. In any case, new work to add to my portfolio!
C#
As my official C# course has ended, I’ve continued my studies with the book Fundamentals of Computer Programming with C#. Where the course went over the fundamentals pretty quickly so you could start building something fast, this book goes really in-depth. And it contains excersises after each chapter, so I can really use it to improve my programming skills! Most of the excersises focus on math problems, brings back flashbacks from my math classes in high school! So far I’ve created programs that calculate prime numbers, numbers from the Fibonnacci series and find a sum or product in a given array of n numbers, things like that. Not sure if it helps making games, but it makes sense to me to start with the fundamentals.
Tabletop RPG & board game ventures
This month I also reached out to board game publishers and tabletop roleplay game publishers. I realised I loved doing full illustrations as much as I like doing concept art or game assets, so why not try to get more illustration jobs?
Within a few mails I got a reply from a board game publisher, whenever I might wanted to illustrate upcoming board games published in 2022 and what my rates where. I was suprised I got a foot between the door so quickly, but after I send them my rates they replied they didn’t pay more than 80 euros per character illustration. That would come down to about 10 euros per hour – quite far from what I usually ask for such work, of course.
Someone else got back to me asking if I would be open to do an illustration for $200 (about €160, before taxes). I hestitated at first, but decided to go for it, you have to start somewhere, right? Unfortunately the person changed his mind and wanted me to do four black-and-white illustrations for $50 each instead – each of these illustrations containing one or multiple characters and a background – in no way doable for me without getting below minimum wage.
I was quite shocked by this, to be honest. Are these rates normal? And how do people making a living if this is what you get paid for such an amount of work? After asking around and doing some more research, it dawned upon me that these are actually quite standard rates, though there is a lot of variation between companies. Illustrators working in this field all supplement their income with taking on work from other sources or have a partner that can fill in the gaps, I suppose.
So yeah, in my experience, video games pay way better!
Swim On Zine
Let’s end this post with a visual component: here’s a little preview of the shark illustration I did for the Swim On zine! This collaborative charity art zine paying tribute to all kinds of sharks, containing 100 illustrations by 76 artists. All proceeds made from the zine will be donated to WildAid (formerly sharksavers.org).