Fan artists as production artists (Patreon)

Over the weekend, I completed the task of writing up the Elder Scrolls Legends Clockwork City storyline for the Imperial Library, and adding screenshots to the stories I'd written up previously. This inevitably lead to me thinking about the vast amount of art generated for the title, and the various critiques, big and small, I have with it. Which, in turn, made me tweet this:

@AmorphousGamer fairly asked why companies don't already do this. Rather than trying to cram everything into a very long twitter thread, I thought I'd reply here.

So, why don't people hire fan artists for professional projects at scale? 

First, the idea of hiring artists from the community to do production art could really only work if the art is not blocking development. A CCG is ideal for this - nothing about the art has any impact on the gameplay design or programming, and everything can get shoved in at the last minute if needed. Book illustrations would be another project where this sort of staffing could work (as long as requirements were determined beforehand). For a project like ESO or TESVI, concept art is the first step in development. Any delay at this step is going to cascade forward into every facet of production. Artists in this sort of project need to be embedded in the team (onsite or virtually), and will be producing a specialized type of art with very specific constraints. Concept art is skill that not everyone that can draw really well has. 

Second, this assumes that the people hiring for art outsource have a community of highly skilled artists, and are aware of it. TES is very fortunate in this regard, but not all IPs are. 

So, assuming that the project is suitable and the artists are there, why not hire them? I think the reasons can be boiled down into two camps: scale and professionalism. 

Scale first. If you take a look at ArtStation, you'll find that the majority (maybe even all) of Legends art was created by several art outsourcing houses (Nuare, LemonSky, Massive Black, etc.). Using an outsource company versus an individual artist (whether they're a fan or not) allows you to bucket your work, sending out 5 prompts at once and having them all come back at the same time, rather than one after the other. It also allows you to scale up easier -- you can send out 40 prompts and say you need them in 2 months time, and the company will schedule them around available artists, instead of making you find/contact/contract 30 additional artists yourself for what may only be one card each. Working with a company also de-risks things a bit as far as deliveries, since if someone is sick for a week someone else can try to take over their work. 

Hiring a company also takes away some of your management overhead, as they have their own producers and art directors to keep artists on schedule, do checkins, give guidance, and correct mistakes before they ever get to you. 

Professionalism, here, is a bucket term for all the things involved in working as an artist that aren't creating art. When you're working with a professional freelance artist (whether they're independent of part of a studio setup), you can assume that they'll be devoting a full work day to your project, that they'll know to respect contracts and NDAs, how to take feedback and deliver work in a timely manner, etc. All these assumptions aren't true of all freelance artists all the time, but they are safer to make in regards to folks already working professionally versus fan artists, who likely have never worked on a professional project before, may still be in school or working another job, etc. While this doesn't mean that a brand new fan artist will leak your info and deliver you bad work late, it does likely mean that you'll need to hold their hand a bit and pad their time more than you would with a pro (though giving yourself some extra time is always good practice anyway). 

Given all that, why do I think that hiring fan artists for a project like Legends is something worth trying? 

While you'd be adding production effort, you would be taking away a lot of art direction overhead, and adding the sort of attention to detail that only someone very familiar with the world will have. The familiarity of a fan artist with the IP allows you to reduce the amount of time spent explaining universe basics (Dunmer have red eyes, dragons only have 4 limbs, etc.) and focus on actual artistic direction. The artist is also able to more effectively do research themselves to fill in any gaps not covered by your prompt. For example, if you ask for an illustration of a Morag Tong assassin in the 3rd era, a fan artist will be able to know which armor is appropriate out of all the images that pop up when you google "morag tong." They'll know that Jiub has one blind eye, and that Cliff Racers have that weird top wing thing (note: I don't know if these two things are something that Nuare was told specifically not to do, or if it was an accidental omission - either way, I'm not blaming the artist here). 

That's not to say that the art for Legends is bad -- just that I think there is an extra level of fidelity and attention to detail that can be achieved by working with artists that are intimately familiar with the source material, and that there is effort to be saved on the production/direction side. This is also all completely off the cuff theoretical... I'd love to run into someone that's tried this sort of thing on their production!