Board Game Illustration - A Guide to Hiring and Pricing
A few months ago I wrote an article on budgeting for, and hiring professional quality illustrators and graphic designers. I got a lot of questions. Mostly around specifics in where to hunt for talent, where to find more budget friendly illustration, and what to look for in an illustrator.
The goal for this article is to be a comprehensive guide to finding and hiring for board game illustration in a range of budgets. I hope to address:
Understanding your game’s needs
The cost of artwork
Where to find illustrators
Sourcing more affordable artwork
The tradeoffs between more affordable options
Other considerations
Before we get to all of that, some house-keeping:
If you are an illustrator trying to break into the field of professional board game illustration, I wrote an article specifically for you: check it out.
This article is focused on hiring for illustration. Typically, you will hire for graphic design separately (or handle it internally). Of course, there are some illustrators who will do the graphic design as well, and studios like Quillsilver that will handle it all in house (I am a big fan of Dann May’s design and art direction).
Art by Stephen Nickel - WIP “Maple Way” for Nut Hunt
Understanding the needs of your game
The board game market is crowded with over 4,500 games published in 2019 alone. Professional presentation and standing out visually is more important than ever. That said, not every game, and not every designer has the same needs. Before you go down the rabbit hole of finding and hiring for illustration there are a few things you should consider.
What is your professional goal for the game - are you planning on licensing it to a publisher, self publishing, or is it for friends and family? If you aren’t publishing the game yourself, then any money you spend on artwork should be for your own personal fulfilment and is not a business decision.
How important is bespoke artwork for your game? Will your game suffer from more non-specific back catalogue pieces?
How much artwork needs to be completed upfront, or can be tackled later in development or after a funding event (Kickstarter, an investor, etc).
How important is artwork to the genre of game that you are working on? Some euro games are intentionally sparse, and a lot of party games (Apples to Apples) eschew almost all artwork.
How specific is your vision, and how much freedom do you want to give your illustrator?
A lot of these considerations might be decided due to budget constraints. But it is important to have your finished product in mind. Maybe you need to find a financial partner, maybe save up for art a bit longer, or maybe you are ready to put rubber to pavement.
The Cost of Artwork
This is a tricky subject, and everything I write here is contextual to my experience with recent pricing (Spring-Summer 2021). If you are reading this in the future (hello future reader), make sure to take into account inflation. I will start with professional grade illustration and then drill into some items that could increase or decrease your quoted cost. Then we will get a bit more into budget considerations and finding illustrators.
Professional illustration costs at least $50 an hour.
For context a magic the gathering size fully rendered image might cost in the $500-$1,000 range. A fully illustrated box cover in the $3,000-$6,000 range. This is with basic use and resale rights, buying exclusivity (more on that later) could add +50% to project specs. [Update: I was directed to a reddit post (Jan 2021) and this post from Suzanne Helmigh (Nov 2020) with good color on pricing by various publishers].
Pricing will depend on the specifics of your project, the rights you are purchasing, the art style, how in demand your artist is, and a myriad of other factors. But these ball-park ranges should get you started. Most of the quotes we got for Nut Hunt were in the ~$10,000 range. Nut Hunt has 19 full color, fully illustrated landscape tile art hexes (Catan size), one full box art, and 4 simple (ink style) drawings of nuts.
Non-full illustrations (i.e. just a character on a flat background, or iconography) will cost less. There is a lot of variability in pricing based on skill and how established an artist is professionally. I’ve seen lower skill artists advertise $25-$50 for character illustrations, whereas a professional working artist might charge $300 for flat colors, and up to $900 for a full render (without rights attached).
Art by Stephen Nickel - WIP “Birch Grove” for Nut Hunt
Things that Effect Pricing
There is a saying that you can have two of: quality, speed, and cost, but not all three. I haven’t found the adage particularly useful, and prefer to think about cost in terms of skill and scope.
Skill: The professional skill, and where an illustrator is in their career will be a large factor in their hourly rate. My experience is that you generally pay for what you get, or at least pay for surety of execution and consistency.
Style: Some styles require more expertise/experience or are more time consumer to execute. A caricature or cartoon style might have more budget friendly options when compared to a digital watercolor. Iconography will be a lot more affordable than detailed fully developed scenes.
Color & Shading: Is the artwork flat color, cel shaded, fully rendered, or black and white?
Rights, we’ll touch on it a little more later, but if you are self publishing then you need use and resale rights for a table-top game, digital board game, and marketing materials. If you want exclusivity (i.e. the artist can’t re-use or re-sell the artwork), then plan on adding about 50% onto the cost.
Number of images, sizes, detail, whether there is background, whether your box art wraps around the sides, etc. will all effect your overall project pricing. I wouldn’t recommend skimping on necessary artwork, but you may be able to get away with only commissioning a limited number of full pieces through your Kickstarter or other funding event.
Bespoke versus back catalogue. If you don’t have specific artwork needs, but want high quality artwork from a professional illustrator you can query them on their back catalogue. They might have excellent artwork that you can buy rights to.
Art by Stephen Nickel - WIP “Untitled” for Nut Hunt
Where to find Illustrators of Varying Skill & Price Levels
Every platform will have some portion of incredibly skilled, professional level illustrators. The delineations below are based on my personal experience with regards to the concentration of professional grade illustrators, and ease of connecting with a professional grade illustrator.
Typically you pay for the skill/level of professional achievement that you get. So these should roughly correlate with the price that you can expect to pay (all else equal).
Premium/Professional Quality:
Board Game Geek: Find the board games that have your favorite art, go on BGG and look at the credits. Google the illustrators, find their Art Stations and web-pages and reach out. This is the method we used to find our graphic designer. In a similar vein, games like Magic: The Gathering have employed hundreds of high quality artists. Scroll through an image gallery of a recent set and I guarantee you can spot some art that you love by artists who are open to commission.
Twitch / Instagram: There are some vibrant social media communities of illustrators. Twitch, Instagram, and to a growing extent TikTok are all good places to browse for an artist. What is especially helpful is if you like an artist you can see a bit of a behind the scenes of their work process, interact with them (to see if there is a good interpersonal fit), and an added bonus is that they will have a built in audience that can help your marketing efforts. You will also get to explore a broad range of styles that could really set your game apart.
Art Station / Deviant Art: A lot of artists use Art Station as their professional landing page. It can also be a good place to browse. The one draw back is that it can be a lot less obvious as to who is actively taking commissions.
Hit or Miss With a Broader Range of Talent
Your network: You can still find professional level illustrators here, and in fact this is how we ultimately connected with our illustrator (I know Steve’s agent through the Magic: The Gathering original art collector community). In reality this will be a lot of hit and miss depending on your social network. Make sure that you are honestly assessing the skill-levels of your friends, family, and friends of friends. I would also be especially careful of contracting friends and family without very clearly defined expectations. If you are pursuing board game publishing professionally - then you need partners who will treat it professionally and expect to be treated like professionals.
Forums for sharing artwork - with rules against solicitation: Examples of this would be board game design groups like the Board Game Design Lab Facebook group, the Art & Graphic Design for Tabletop Games group, or the DND subreddit. Anywhere where people are sharing their commissions and work they commissioned should have some good talent. I have had a harder time finding high skilled illustrators in forums specifically for soliciting work (more on that below).
Art Schools: I haven’t tried this one, but it makes intuitive sense, and I know has been done before. Make a job posting at an art-school or reach out to some university art professors. Students will have a range of skill level, but should be a more affordable option than an illustrator well established in their career.
More Difficult to Find High Quality & Professional Level Work
Forums for Soliciting Work: It was counter-intuitive, but I had very little success in finding high quality professional level illustrators in places like Starving Artists and other forums for soliciting illustrative work. I am sure there are some great illustrators on the platforms, but when posting to those forums I found my inbox inundated with less experienced and lower skill level artists.
Fiverr/Upwork: Similar to the forums, platforms specifically for hire had a larger pool of less experienced illustrators.
Free & Reduced Rate
Royalty Free: There is tons of royalty free artwork out there. Some is a better fit for specific genres or specific games, but it is worth considering. Others have compiled pretty good lists of where to look, so I will leave those here: The Mindful Geek, The Game Crafter. The trade off with royalty free or non-bespoke artwork is that you will likely need to work a little harder to manipulate it / on the graphic design front. Terraforming Mars is a great example of a successful game that used royalty free material for their card art.
Back Catalogues: This is a little tangential, but throughout all of this it is worth keeping in mind that illustrators often have large back catalogues of work that they will sell rights to. If you love an illustrator, but their commission rates are too steep for your project, ask them about their back catalogues.
Game Iconography: There are a number of companies that sell access to game iconography or catalogues of artwork. I am not familiar with their quality, so won’t link any here, but if it is something that you are interested in, I would suggest googling for “game iconography/art catalogues”, or asking about others’ experiences in design forums.
Art by Stephen Nickel - WIP “The Tangle” for Nut Hunt
Tradeoffs
The benefits of working with an established professional are that you get high quality work product. You are partnering with someone who has worked on similar projects and can provide a consistent deliverable. You also lighten some of the back end graphic design work as they will either be knowledgeable about board game specs, or can work to specs that your graphic designer provides. The downside is that they are more expensive.
More budget conscious options will be trading down on either artwork quality, stylistic flexibility, consistency, or surety of execution. That doesn’t mean that you can’t make a great and successful game with more affordable artwork (or completely free artwork), but it might be harder to execute on, or more limited in scope.
Other Important Considerations
This is mostly stuff that I wish I knew earlier in our journey, that didn’t have an organic place to squeeze into the rest of the article. It’s kind of a hodgepodge:
How to query an artist. Magic: The Gathering illustrator Randy Gallegos wrote a great article on how to query illustrators. If you have not hired for art and graphic design before, it is a must read.
Understanding rights. You need Use and Resale Rights in Perpetuity for table top board games, digital board games, and marketing materials. You might want to negotiate exclusivity on some of the artwork, or an option to acquire exclusivity. I wrote an article on understanding the rights associated with artwork.
What a contract looks like. Here are some contract templates that some lawyers put together. They are a good starting point. Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer so do your own research / talk to your own representation.
Artwork specs. Artwork should be 400+ dpi. A lot of manufacturers print at 300, but 400 is safe and gives you some flexibility on manipulating it during graphic design. Make sure to understand printing requirements at your manufacturer and that your illustrator knows to account for margins, die lines, and bleed. You can read up on Panda’s specifications here. This is an important benefit of working with an experienced graphic designer.
Our illustrator for Nut Hunt is Stephen Nickel (twitch, AS, Discord). He has out-delivered on our expectations every step of the way. His artwork is top notch (you can see some works in progress peppering this article), and he was fair and straightforward when we negotiated our contract terms. If you are at a loss for a place to start, give him a look. Steve is a member of a consortium of illustrators who are also worth checking out.
Update: since the post went up this great article by Eric Hanuise (Flatline Games) was shared with me (article, video summary). It covers a lot of the technical aspects and how to approach things like art direction, project specs, and his experience commissioning art. It is definitely some recommended further reading.
Where did you find the illustrator for your project? How has your experience differed from ours?
