the role of a Lead Artist
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Hiiiiiiiiiiii! Today I would like to discuss the role of a Lead Artist (from here on referred to as LA) as I have implemented it during my work with Depth. Our group (Ettin) has two graphic designers (blessed), so it was not a clear choice who should take on the role as LA. Since there were only one of each other minor in the team, we reasoned that the ”extra” artist would be Lead Sound Designer. Truthfully, I don’t recall exactly what was said, but it was fairly quickly agreed upon that Ben would be Lead Sound Designer and I would be LA. Personally, my biggest motivation for this was to challenge myself and step out of my comfort zone. Until very recently I have been suffering from a major art block which has made me uncomfortable with coming up with original ideas and I rather take directive from someone else, however, since the beginning of this course I have felt an improvement in this area and I thought that this challenge would be the perfect opportunity to grow even further and improve my confidence. I also strongly felt that I wanted to use pixel art and as a LA I would have the final say in case someone in my group would disagree (hehe) fortunately, I didn’t need to convince anyone as they were all on board from the beginning. In hindsight I can see two problems when it comes to the choice of me as the teams LA. First of all, the fact that I have struggled with an art block and used this as my opportunity to grow personally can be seen as a bit selfish, since it is a risk for not only me but the other team members as well. However, when I considered my previous experience in working with my group, I felt confident that they would back me up in case I would have problems with this task. Ben and I have communicated well before when working on the concept document and I trusted him to support me, which made me feel confident I would not fail. So far, I think it has worked out The second problem would be that compared to me, Ben has more experience and skill when it comes to pixel art. Therefore, it might have been the wiser choice to pick him as the LA. Truth be told, I feel like he has more skill when it comes to animation as well (and tiles, unity, etc… haha) but I chose not to let this stop me from challenging myself. Again, this might be seen as selfish but since our team work has worked well so far, I think we will be all right. In addition to this, the role of LA is not the same as Artist Dictator (haha), I am trying my best to listen to all the group members opinions and wishes and make the decisions together as often as possible. I have never before been assigned this role, and I imagine that I’m not the only one in our program without a 100% clear understanding of exactly what is expected of me. As I mentioned earlier, I have tried to include everyone when making any decisions and asking before finalizing any designs throughout the whole project. My first “move” as an LA (apart from deciding on using pixel art which you can read about in my previous post) was to distribute the graphic assignments to myself and Ben. I decided that we each take one of the main assets that were the most “fun” to create (I got the big boss sea creature and Ben got the avatar submarine), then I got to work on the smaller enemies and Ben started working on tiles for the level design. The rest of the assets were distributed as we went, since I wanted to see how quickly we worked individually and to make sure that adjustments could be made in case one person had too much of a work load. I then preceded to make two extremely quick “place holder” sketches that we could implement in Unity right away, so the project wouldn’t be slowed down by us artists. I also made a mood board for the cave (background and tiles) for Ben to take inspiration from, this was to make sure he didn’t spend too much time making assets that I would later want to reject. Unfortunately, when it came to the submarine I had not yet made a mood board and I was not completely satisfied with the first design. I made sure that Ben was OK with me rejecting it before I proceeded to make a mood board for the submarine as well and had him make a new design. The new design was perfect!
To the left; Bens first submarine design. To the right; Bens second submarine design. Learning by my mistake I created a more detailed mood board for the cave as well and uploaded it to our shared google drive folder.
Above are two examples from my ”Cave Mood Board” As far as my role as LA goes I have not done much more. From here on I will continue to produce mood boards and be transparent and communicate with the whole group to prevent having to cut more designs. I am of course also working on the other assets in the game and not only directing and deciding things (hehe). That’s it for now I think. Sorry for the long post!
Byyyyyyeeeee!  |
(Phew!)
