c#

What I’ve been up to (July)

| Saskia

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

wobbegong preview
Sneak peak of the wobbegong shark I painted for Swim On!

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).

What I’ve been up to (June)

| Saskia

In an effort to try to get into blogging regularly, I’m following Joni van der Leeuw‘s example and try to write regular blogs about what I did the past weeks. I like writing but it’s one of those things that quickly drop to last place on the to-do list and therefore never gets done. I’m opting for monthly updates now as weekly seems a bit too much effort (and I don’t know how much I have to share anyway), but we’ll see!

Job hunting

MerMay has come to an end, and so have a lot of projects I worked on the last three months. Yes, my planner is almost completely empty: that means hustling for jobs again!

I applied for a few job offers, though, and last week was nothing else than drawing art tests. I suddenly found myself drawing only space suits and ships the whole day to meet the deadlines, oops!

  • space suit colours
  • space suit design
Two art tests in one week is a bit too much, but I’m still impressed with how much I could get done.

Indigo

Indigo is the most important game industry network event of the Netherlands, always taking place on the last Friday of June. Just like last year it was held completely online. Met new people, some who might hold exciting opportunities! I have a few more meetings next week that spilled over, fingers crossed!

C#

And last but not least: I’ve been learning how to program in C#! Back in April I had a few meetings with a career coach (a free opportunity I thought wouldn’t hurt) and I did some tests to chart my interests and skills. Guess what? Even though I’m a creative person (duh haha) I’m also quite happy doing analytical stuff. In fact, I’m the opposite of the chaotic artist cliché, I’m actually a very organised person, starts work every day at the same time, never comes late to meetings, etc. And the fact that I’ve had a self-build website in my teens and installed this website myself too shows I have affinity with code the very least!

So my career coach strongly advised to look into programming. There is, after all, a high demand in developers. I came across a C# course I could participate in for free due government subsidy, so I took my chance! C# is after all the scripting language in Unity, probably the most popular game engine.

This is not a career switch, though! I do not want to give up all the time and energy that I’ve been putting into finding my way around illustration and game art. I just think that knowing my way around code will be a valuable asset. And it would be cool to develop my own little games, wouldn’t it?