Some very good ideas here, Fred. For some crazy reason I commission art for my game now and then and this was pretty helpful advice.

IMAO, the requirements I gave you to give to artists for S7S were fairly high on at least a couple pieces.

One reason we at Hero can allow for some “wiggle room” (as you so accurately put it ) is that we don’t usually publish books that are specifically tied to a visually distinct setting (many aren’t tied to any setting at all). If I were having to write RPG books set in Glorantha, or Tekumel, or any such similar world, I would definitely be very, very picky about making sure the art “fit” (or, in the case of my own creations, “matched my own sublime artistic vision” ). With the Champions Universe stuff we’ll have to be more cautious about what artists do with the art, but even there we’re not nearly as constrained as if I got to write TEKUMEL HERO.

If I was working with a real artist, though, I’d want to go through some intermediate work (especially if dealing with colour images) because I have some eye for it myself and because I have an idea about what I want. In fact I’m not sure there’s an artist out there who’d be interested in working as closely with me as I’d prefer. I may get to test this in 2010.

I would add one thing to the specifics: get it in writing (easy in the age of the internet) and keep it in writing (often forgotten). I cannot remember how many times I have had a vendor tell me that we agreed upon one set of dates, only to be faced with the prior e-mail in which we agreed to my dates. This is a very fast route to getting black-listed in my editorial group.

Daniel Scribner
Production Editor
John Wiley & Sons

As an art director who has gone through the pain of producing a 389 page fully illustrated book in the last few weeks, I really wish I had seen this before. That said I think I fumbled through and came to the same conclusions and developed a strong rapport with some excellent artists, who are all eager to work for us again. However there are times where you do need to be blunt, and I have had to reject whole commissions, and realised that sometimes artists (including myself) can lose their mojo and miss the mark.
One thing that many do not realise is that art directors have to compile huge amounts of information and provide a lot of support to their artists. I create PDF’s of sample visual references, give quotes from the text and write an average of 250 per piece commissioned. Then again I am commissioning art for a very complex world, that has been drawn incorrectly so many times in the past, that I had to take the artists through a very steep learning curve. The results were all worth it and I love the guys I worked with for their hard work and commitment to the project.

Simon Bray
Art Director Moon Design Publications
http://www.glorantha.com

As someone who’s done just a small amount of art gathering, it’s very clear to me that there’s two facets to the artist’s role: producing good work, and customer relations/communication. The latter is probably more important, as it’s harder for someone who doesn’t have it to develop it, whereas I think you can work with someone talented to smooth off any rough edges on the work.

Definitely going silent and leaving me guessing is a good way to drop down my list. And actually, for a small press guy doing their own work this is really *disappointing*, because the reason I’ve contacted you in the first place is because I’ve spent time hunting around and said, “Yes, that guy’s style of art would look really cool on the pages of my current brainchild!”

Conversely, there people I’ve worked with who I’d look for excuses to use again because I know they’ll be pleasant and helpful. I was talking to one of these at a con this weekend and was actually disappointed that I couldn’t fit his style into my current project. *That’s* what Fred is talking about.