Looking for a Character/Scene artist for Airships: Conquer the Skies

Airships: Conquer the Skies
7 Oct 2015, 3:52 p.m.

Airships: Conquer the Skies is an indie game currently under development and in early access. It's a steampunk real-time strategy game where you build airships out of components and fight with them.

At this point in the development, I need a graphical artist to complement my work on the game. While I can produce pixel art for the in-game graphics, I can't create high-quality character portraits or complex scenes. This is where you come in.

What I need from you:

  • Character portraits as well as larger scenes of airship battles.
  • Ability to work within an existing colour scheme and mesh with the existing aesthetic.
  • Reliability and commitment to the project. I expect that the project needs graphics at various points over the next 9 months. This doesn't mean I need you anything like full-time on this, but I need you to not leave partway through. For the game to look good, it needs a consistent art style coming from one person, so switching artists halfway would be a big setback.

What I don't need from you:

  • In-game pixel art, animations or 3D work.
  • Super-fast turnaround. Taking a few weeks for a piece of art is fine, taking a few months isn't.

What I'm offering is your choice of:

  • Per-piece payment at your stated rates.
  • 10% revenue share on all future sales of the game. (Revenue here means money from sales after Steam/other portals take their cut, but before anything else like taxes or other payments. The game has so far sold several thousand copies, and I very much expect it will sell at least several thousand more.)

You will also be listed as an artist in the game credits.

Selection criteria:

  • Quality of art / art style.
  • Track record of delivering for other projects, games or otherwise.

Legal details:

  • This is a freelancer-customer arrangement and not an employee-employer arrangement. You are responsible for taxes and insurance required by your place of residence.
  • As work-for-hire, the copyright of the created artwork is assigned to me. (This is negotiable: if you prefer, we can come to an arrangement where you retain the rights and license the artwork to me.)
  • I am happy to hire people of any background - nationality, ethnicity, gender, etc.

Interested? Email me with samples of your work, your preferred form of compensation/rates, and some general info about yourself.

Edit Being more specific with what I need:

  • 4-20 headshot unit portraits for air sailors/air marines/air captains, etc.
  • One or a small sequence of splash screens (full-screen scenes)
  • About a dozen mission illustrations (quarter-screen scenes)

Style-wise, I'm up for anything that you think can mesh with the existing art style of the game. It doesn't have to imitate the art, just not clash horribly. High-res pixel art could work, so could digital airbrush, or vector illustrations. Crew portraits should be realistic or semi-realistic, so not super-stylized or cartoonish. The game sprites have a colour scheme that gets modified by the lighting conditions.

I guess in some ideal magical world, if someone is able to create unit portraits with no baked-in shading and a normal map, that could be hooked into the lighting engine for some very cool visuals.