Art Evolution 2: Eric Vedder
Last week I kicked off the Art Evolution blog series, explaining my plan to collect ten of the greatest fantasy role-playing artists for a shared project to illustrate a single character in their best known style. For my first installment I chose Earthdawn and Shadowrun artist Jeff Laubenstein.
With Jeff Laubenstein and a ‘Shadowrun Lyssa‘ in the fold, I took stock of my list and imagined how I would gain other universally recognizable names. I determined that each name carried a ‘weight’, a kind of industry standard validity recognizable to other artists.
Remember, I was working this alone, without a single writing credit to my name, so I had to find legitimacy where I could. Understanding that, and without a previously established friendship with the lion’s share of these artists, I needed a greater combined ‘weight’ of already contracted artists to approach the next heavier weighted contributor on my list.
At this point I only had a single artist signed so I went back into the few art connections I’d made during my time trying to market my other writings. Like most struggling writers in their publishing infancy, I believed there might be a shortcut or magic bullet to getting published. J.K. Rowling couldn’t buy bread before Harry Potter, but she went out and purchased a lovely red transparent folder to place her Potter manuscript in before she sent it to a perspective publisher.