Secondary Artist Applications (Patreon)

I have processed a bunch of artist applications for the secondary artist position. Sadly I was overwhelmed with lots of applicants that all said they could easy peasy emulate Emubi's art style but had nothing to back it up and when they provided me samples, it was not at all even remotely close.

From those who had strong portfolios, I performed a test commission to redraw Charlotte in Emubi's style and also matching the level of detail of the general character artwork. Sadly - again - among the top choices, only one responded to proceed. The others maybe lost interest in the position as the process has been taking a while. Well, a while, I'm not giving away the position a couple of hours or days after putting out the recruiment ad... I dunno, anyways, so we have 1 applicant for performed the test commission.

Besides him, we also have an applicant who sadly had no portfolio to present but instead sent me a test sample for free which looked acceptable for a first try to emulate Emubi.

In addition, I also commissioned Emubi to give his interpretation of Charlotte so we have something to compare to (and in the case that none of the applicans suit us, we also have the Charlotte character artwork in the bag :'D) Emubi has also proposed to contact one of his previous assisstants to speed up his workflows. That would bring the pro of not needing a secondary artist. Also since the assisstant would be directly managed by Emubi, there is no management effort on my side. The downside would be, that since they are only an assistant, we would not be able to further scale up with future investments. But maybe that's also not a problem since there isn't that much development time left and there are many other areas we can invest money into, provided we keep growing of course. The second downside would be that we still face the risk that if Emubi would get seriously sick over a longer period of time or otherwise become indisposed, just like now, we wouldn't have a backup. With a proper secondary artist, we could temporarily shift the budget over to them and the risk would be mitigated.

So yeah, there are pros and cons on all sides. I was kind of hoping I could be presenting some more possible options today, but alas, there core problem here is simply that there are too many artists claiming to be able to copy Emubi's style, but only a few have convinving enough portfolios for me to be worth to put money into a test commission, and even fewer are willing to do it for free if they don't have the portfolio to backup their work. Test commissioning the ones who don't have a good portfolio is just too much money investment... And honestly, in many cases it felt like a scam with the applying artist just wanting to get some quick money out of the test commission. 

Now, let's get to Charlotte, as a reminder, the requirements were

• Emulate Emubi's style
• Match Aura's character artwork's level of detail
• Weapon can be ignored
• Match the boob size to the story, i.e. small

Directly after this poll I will create a patreon-exclusive poll.

RPGMaker Stock Artwork

First we have the original character artwork from the RPGMaker asset pack.

Emubi

Then, as a baseline we have Emubi's redrawing of Charlotte.

Ianmorpol

Portfolio: https://www.artstation.com/ianmorpol 

HokiArt

Portfolio: None. But the sample was free and at least somewhat matched the artstyle, so no reason for me to reject him from the voting round.