Black Gate

I’ve often been asked ‘how cool is it to have all that original art from the Art Evolution Project?’ or ‘What will you do with all that original art?’ I tend to smile when I hear it because it somehow means that I know more than most where the world of art is concerned. The primary thing would be that the bulk of artists don’t give up originals these days unless you are willing to pay a king’s ransom for them, and the secondary is that much of the work done for me in the project was at least ‘touched’ by a computer or fully rendered in a digital format. The reality is that the original is not the piece you see, assuming there is even ‘hard’ original to begin with.

That in itself is a testament to the changing landscape of art and the power of the computer when used in the process of creation. Still, it leaves many people feeling a bit hollow, the new inability to own an original because only an artist’s hard drive has the capability for that. The computer also rocked the art field as the backlash from the lack of original hard art begging the question ‘is digital art, ‘real’ art?’

Everyone who is anyone has an opinion on this, and certainly one of my favorite views on the subject comes from Lazarus Chernick in his WordPress blog that can be found here, but instead of trusting the husband of an artist, I went out and got three well known artists to address the subject.

The following are responses to the question of digital art being real art.

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Last year I was in a pickle concerning a project I’d been working on for a decade. I was looking to complete a demo deck of a card game but to do that I needed art. Art, however, isn’t cheap, and although I had a dozen established friends in the industry who were artists, even ‘friend’ rates for color renderings were running minimally just over one-hundred dollars per card. With one-hundred fifteen individual pieces, that would come to $12,650 just for art.

During a discourse with David Deitrick, we talked over numbers and what some of his art might look like. I invested the going rate of $110 to see what I’d be getting for the game because I thought David’s talents lent very well to the post-apocalyptic theme.

David did up this wonderful piece, and although I loved the style, in the end there was no way I could afford to pay him for the entire project. Knowing that all my other artist contacts were in the same range or much higher, I did what any red-blooded entrepreneur would, I looked to outsource.

The advent of the Internet has made finding artists easy, just take a look at a full world of ready to employ artists on DeviantArt or Elance. It’s simple, just log in, find a message board, post what you want, and let the portfolios flow in.

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Art evolves, one generation of role-players leading into the next and each attaches it’s best memories to the artists that defined their games of choice. This ongoing series continues, but if you’ve missed previous entries they can be found here.

With the help of Wizards of the Coast I had my ‘Caldwell Lyssa’, and the weeks for the project were growing short. These final days became the most trying for me as artists started to hedge, deadlines were missed, and suddenly I faced the possibility that I might not get twenty artists when I was assured only months before that I’d have twenty-five.

Still, with every prick of a thorny dropout, there were those who provided a silver lining. Out there among the countless catalogues of incredible gaming work there were some artists who simply smiled and said ‘when do you need it’.

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The evolution of fantasy art finds another player this week, but if you’ve missed any past artist you can restart the journey here.

With the latest version in hand, I now had a ‘Nouveau Lyssa’, and my industry contacts were growing with seventeen artists down, the original total of ten far surpassed. Still, if I wanted twenty it was going to be difficult to do.

I went back into my desires for the project, and over the course of the months involved there were still regrets about some artists who’d said ‘no thank you’. One of these was Clyde Caldwell. Surprisingly, although Clyde had refused an entry into the project, he was always gracious enough to reply to emails.

After a year of random emails we’d grown rather close, and I think that fact made his exclusion to the project all the more painful to me.

You see, there’s the very intriguing part of Clyde’s decision not to do the project. According to his own website, and I quote: “I generally don’t take on a private commission unless I like the subject matter (Hint: In case you haven’t noticed, I like to draw and paint scantily clad or nude, sexy female characters!)”. Now, I read that quote a hundred times, and each time I did so I kept saying to myself ‘what the hell?’ Lyssa IS his favorite subject matter! It’s something I still haven’t made sense of to this day.

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Yep, it’s Art Evolution Wednesday here on Black Gate! If you’ve been absent on Wednesdays for the past three months you can find what has come before here.

Now my ‘Goth Lyssa’ was in the ring of honor and I was looking to continue my collection with someone I’d grown kind of gaga for after attending GenCon 09, but let me set the stage…

I love fantasy art, that’s a given, but I have to admit if I’m not looking over dragons and knights I like to sit back with a chai tea and dream of the work of Alphonse Mucha. I’ve had a Mucha calendar above my desk for seven straight years, and you know, the images just keep getting better.

This love of Art Nouveau is kind of core deep for me, and during that 09 GenCon I was trying to get over my horrible intro debacle with Jeff Easley in 08 by being a cool and collected art aficionado. Yeah, that lasted all of three seconds when I’m walking past a Chessex dice display and ran into the art of Echo Chernik.

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