Part of what I do in my freelance work is art direction. As briefly as I can put it, art direction is the process of conceptualizing the art used for a project, then commissioning and coordinating the artists contracted to execute on the concept.
I’m a very email-driven guy — my inbox is my to-do list — and I tend to get pretty wordy when I communicate. As such, I put a lot of effort into clearly communicating the needs of the project to the artist or artists. I expect a reciprocal effort on the artist’s part, and when I get it, the artist tends to get my loyalty as a repeat customer, going into my list of “usual suspects” for my subsequent projects.
For example, early on I had the fortune to find Christian N. St. Pierre when I needed art for Spirit of the Century (and the Dresden Files RPG, though that particular art buy turned out to be more than a bit premature). He delivered quickly, and communicated throughout the process of work. I didn’t have a lot of art direction experience at the time, but my interactions with Christian formed a lasting basis for how I want to do work. Later, in working with Hero Games and on other projects, Brett Barkley and Storn Cook (and several others) have also shown this kind of work process. It’s a good one.
A sidebar: This does mean that my stable of artistic talent tends to grow slowly. Once I hit a critical mass of artists who are regularly available and rate as usual suspects, there’s not a lot of incentive to reach out for new sources. All the same, I try to give a chance to one or two artists I haven’t worked with before with each new project, if the project calls for enough art that multiple artists are needed. If someone knocks this “audition” out of the park, they tend to move onto the usual suspects list. If they flub this critical first impression, it’s damn likely I won’t come knocking again. It’s not that there aren’t some good reasons for a flub, and it’s not that I won’t give second chances on occasion, but to be frank about it there is a greater supply of artists out there than there is demand for art, and my usual suspects methodology doesn’t provide a lot of openings for bringing in new folk.
So as an artist interested in getting more work, you should always keep loyalty-building in mind. Even an artist who doesn’t execute the most technically correct or excellent work can get repeat work by showing a strong loyalty-building work ethic. With loyalty building as the goal, I’m going to dig a few simple principles for building it in the art director/artist relationship.
Fred Hicks is a dad, a gamer, and a game publisher. He runs 
