2d Pixel artist available for freelance work

Monkey Archive Forums/Digital Discussion/2d Pixel artist available for freelance work

fassous(Posted 2015) [#1]
Hi there Dev people,

Hope you are doing great,

I wanted to say that i'm available to do some freelance work, and that i'm offering my services at very cheap prices,

If you ever want to build up a prototype or a full game, I will be glad to provide you with what you need,

You can contact me via mail: rachidlansari@...
or send me a message o this same exact thread

For those who wants to follow me on twitter, I have an account there: http://bit.ly/1LKpTwZ
Concerning people whom are interested in buying gfx packs: http://bit.ly/1AieWxs

Wishing you the best of luck guys :D


Neuro(Posted 2015) [#2]
Got some nice work there!! I maybe in need of your service very soon...


fassous(Posted 2015) [#3]
Thanks, i(ll be glad to cooperate :)


Pakz(Posted 2015) [#4]
The rpg tileset looked like something i would buy if it had more enemy sprites. 4 is not a lot at all.


Playniax(Posted 2015) [#5]
Looking good!


GarBenjamin(Posted 2015) [#6]
Nice sprites and tiles. I already contract out work to a couple different artists. Always good to have another available.
I might have some work for you... it really just depends on how much you charge.
I've talked with many artists and the prices they charge varies so much it is kind of mind-blowing. Some will draw a little sprite for $2 and others want $20 for the same thing.

How much would you charge for a straight top-down view Wizard 16x16 "sprite" in 4 colors facing two directions... north and northeast?

Actually just something like this in total:

standing: just 1 image per direction. 2 images total.
walking: 2 images for animation in each direction. 4 images total.
casting magic in front of him with one-arm: 1 image for each direction (do not draw any "magic" just the wizard). 2 images total.
casting magic with both arms: 1 image for each direction (do not draw any "magic" just the wizard). 2 images total.
hit (taking damage): 1 image for each direction: 2 images total.

12 16x16 4-color images total -- obviously the same 4 colors for all of the images.

Straight top-down and not that angled top down look.

You can reply via Twitter (see my signature) or here whichever you prefer.

Thanks!


Raz(Posted 2015) [#7]
Hi there fassous, have sent you an email, looking forward to hearing from you


Paul - Taiphoz(Posted 2015) [#8]
I also do art although busy at the moment, as for the price the reason it varies so much is that most artist's price per hour ala £20, so a simple set of sprites might take 25 minutes but he's still going to charge you for at least 1 hour, then you have those sprite sheets that look simple at face value and might even get creating fairly quickly but still may take more than an hour in total as the artist sits with the art and tweaks it until its good enough for the client.

When your asking for things that animate that add's another layer of time and complexity even if its only a few frames, for example the way I animate and I think the way most do is that we will draw the starting and ending frames first and then draw in the in-betweens, so for example a walking animation of 5 frames might sound simple but to get it right takes time, that times add's up to extra hours which as you know means more money.

Next time you hire an artist for something try negotiating a fixed price then time is not a factor, some artists might decline but there are more than a few who will be more than happy specially if they are confident they can get the work done quickly, it could save you some money.

[EDIT- Just saw how old this post was, for some reason the forum told me it was a new post. oh well.


Pakz(Posted 2015) [#9]
I should of learned to make graphics if the price is at the height of 20 pounds an hour :D That is 3 times developed country minimum wage is it not? How come they want to make that much? :)
No wonder I only hired an artist only once. Much to expensive for me. Payed almost 200 Euro's once for not that much art.And I do not make money with my games. Bad experience, and feel ripped off (seen how fast things are made on youtube)!!

On a other note. Aseprite is now in Steam Greenlight. It is a good graphics editor from what I seen. I will buy that one and see what I can do with it.


Paul - Taiphoz(Posted 2015) [#10]
It's all about how you value your money and how you value the art being made, it's not about how easy it is for the artist, you don't pay a professional football player less money because he makes scoring goals look easy, you pay him/them because it's something you either cant do, don't have the talent for or don't have the time to invest in.

As for the price you have to think about just how much work the artist gets, I'v not taken on any art for anyone in months because i'm working on my own things, but even when I was taking on jobs for people it's still only a handful of projects a month if lucky, maybe 2 projects a month of which both might be as little as 1 or 2 hours work and that's it for a months pay for the artist, meanwhile the programmer has the potential to earn from the project for the rest of his life, sure the game might be free but that's the dev's choice not the artists.

It's good to look at things from both sides and I'm sure when you do that price tag is actually really low


MikeHart(Posted 2015) [#11]
Its not only the craftmenship that is being payed but most of the time also the design. And usually you go through an iteration process with the client. So it takes more time than you just see on YT videos.
I charge usually per piece or per project. And getting payed on certain milestones.


Pakz(Posted 2015) [#12]
Thing is. If the artist has a lot of followers then it could be worth it. His followers could be potential customers. Those cardgames on bb.com have great art and people visit art museums to see beautiful things. Bob ross also stil has lots of viewers.

I am in the position though that i am at welfare level. Been on that most of my life. So i have not that much to spend. Luckely in the west welfare is 10 times as much as minimum wage in eastern european countries so i can buy things like computers and software. But hiring someone for 40 dollars an hour i can only afford to do a few hours a month and then i would be out of money. So i only did that once. If i know how to get art real cheap then i would of done that more.

When i get a good income one day in the future i wont be that hessitant to buy more art and code and such.


AnotherMike(Posted 2015) [#13]
I think it depends very much if you're working on a professional project or you're just doing it for fun. And where do you live in the world is important as well. Here in Switzerland, for example, an hourly wage of 20 pounds isn't that much as least not if you're trying to live from your arts.


k.o.g.(Posted 2015) [#14]
@off topic german
@AnotherMike hast du Skype, wenn ja lust per Skype in Kontakt zu sein mit schreiben ? Gibt wenige deutsche Monkey-X Programmierer und noch seltener aus der Schweiz ;)


Nobuyuki(Posted 2015) [#15]
If anyone on here were willing to pay me anywhere close to 20 bucks an hour to do their graphical assets for them to have some reliable supplementary income, I'd probably say "absolutely" at this point, lol. Have any of you guys actually paid out at this rate for any substantial amount of work? Seems like it would pay off quicker than the investment that goes into amassing a large games catalog, and I'd actually get to put my degree to use for once...

(Edit: with full apologies to fassous for invading his turf with this post...)


AnotherMike(Posted 2015) [#16]
@k.o.g
Skype verwende ich kaum und ich bin hier auch nicht wirklich aktiv. Ich sende dir ein Email mit meinen Kontaktdaten falls du dich austauschen willst.

Well, for "professional" work 20$ isn't that much. I have never actually paid money for assets, but mainly because I never really created any serious games.If you do this kind of work for a living you'll have to pay taxes, social insurance contributions etc. In the end you don't make 20$ / hour but more like 10$ and, at least in Switzerland, you don't live from 100$ a day. Of course this might not apply for other countries.


Nobuyuki(Posted 2015) [#17]
Switzerland has a median income level that's like 30% higher than the US :)


DruggedBunny(Posted 2015) [#18]
Awesome graphics style, love it!


GarBenjamin(Posted 2015) [#19]
I pay a fixed amount based on the size of the image for all of the artwork I contract out.

For my Monkey X Halloween game I contracted out about 75% of the in-game graphics. I provided the palette, image sizes, rough sketches and descriptions, and number of animation frames needed. I paid $170 for the graphics work I contracted out.

Outsourcing a lot of the graphics is another reason I stayed out of the jam. I just wanted to make a decent Halloween game and knew I needed to contract out a good amount of the graphics in order to complete it in time for Halloween.

However, this game was really just the start of the full game I envision. Next year I will revisit it and scale it up adding multiple stages, probably a boss battle and other stuff. I wouldn't invest in the graphics for just a 2-week "throw-away" game. lol

For me it is entirely reasonable because (a) as someone who is much more of a programmer than an artist art takes me a long time to get right and (b) games need so much art trying to do it all myself would add a lot of time to any project I am doing.

It probably would have easily taken me a week to complete the graphics I contracted out. When you're doing this stuff part-time gotta maximize the amount getting done as much as possible.

For my current Christmas game project I am doing the same thing. I have 3 artists working on this project. This time I am targeting Sega Genesis/Megadrive graphics quality. I just started this project about 2 weeks ago and so far have paid $310 for graphics work.

I have 3 more artists on standby just in case I need to outsource more work in order to get this game done in time for Christmas. Honestly, I just get tired of all of the graphics work. I have enough to do with the game design, programming, sound FX, music and so forth. lol

Again though, this is the first in a series of Christmas games I plan to make. Each Christmas I will revisit this and build it out more. So I'm basically building a bigger game than what anyone will see until maybe 2 or 3 years down the road. Just taking it in 6-week sprints each year.


GarBenjamin(Posted 2015) [#20]
@Pakz I hear you. It is very frustrating when you need graphics for your games and just don't have the time to put into doing it and also don't have the money to put into it.

I've been in that situation. And also in the situation where although having money to invest I could not find any artists.

Fortunately, the situation has changed dramatically the past few years. It is one of the few good things about so many people pouring into game dev trying to strike gold. There are now a huge number of these artists seeking to make money by taking on contract art work for games. Because there are so many of them the prices (just like games) have dropped down considerably to where it is now affordable.

Take a look around out there and you will find many artists looking for work. And a lot of them will say right in their ads CHEAP! Of course, cheap, affordable and low-cost are all subjective terms. I get that. Still it may be worthwhile to have a look around.

What I do is look for artists who would be spending their time just drawing for fun. People who just love making game art. For those people, if you're already spending hours per day just drawing for fun actually being paid to do it is like a dream come true.

I also still do a good amount of my own graphics work. Like in my Halloween game the graphics for the text LIGHT THE FIRES & STAY ALERT!, all of the graphics for the status bar, the big tree, the shadow tree backdrop, spiderweb line, the orbs of dark energy released by killing enemies are all things I made from scratch. Like I said, there is just so much graphics work needed for games. I contract out some (these days most) and do some myself.

Everyone can make some decent graphics and I just posted this same kind of thing over in the GLBasic forums a couple weeks or so ago.
Here is a paraphrased version of that post:

--------------------------------
Every programmer can draw much better than they think they can.

The biggest reason most cannot draw very well that I have seen is because they don't use reference images. And yet every artist I know does use reference images. Many references in fact.

If I needed to create some images for a car for a driving game I'd literally get up in the back of my pickup and take photos of my car. Then turn the wheel in the car and angle the car and repeat. With those as reference images I could then draw a car in the view needed. Or get a matchbox car or RC car. Put it in the viewpoint I need and use that as a reference to draw it. Alternately, just go online and get screenshots of games that have the kind of things you need in your games. Use those as your reference. But not just sit there and start drawing with no reference at all trying to just pull it out of my head.

The second biggest difference I've seen between artists and programmers is the amount of time they spend on an image. I've done a lot of programmer art. And worked with several artists on projects. I'll draw a tile in 2 minutes or a character in 10 minutes. They'll draw a tile in 5 to 15 minutes and a character in 30 minutes to hours. One artist I know who does fantastic work told me he can easily spend up to 1 hour just on the arm of a single animated character sprite. The entire character may take a full day's worth of effort.

I don't and can't possibly spend that kind of time on my graphics work. I also tell the artists I hire to do it in as quick n easy of a way as possible for them. Because any good artist will still produce good quality graphics and I don't want their work for me to be some burden laboring for hours for low pay. But still artists spend far more time on their artwork than programmers do from what I have seen. And they have also spent far more time creating artwork than programmers have. Literally thousands or tens of thousands of hours. Many have been drawing their entire lives.

So.... use references and take your time! You'll probably find you can make much better game graphics than you think you can!
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Paul - Taiphoz(Posted 2015) [#21]
I laughed when I read your car story because I do the exact same thing, although for me it's normally space ships, for example in an old shooter I did the player's ship or at least it's basic shape started out life as a photo of the body section of a toy/lego or duplo guy I forget which, with my mobile in hand I often stop in the middle of a shop or street and pop my phone out to take a picture of something obscure or seemingly stupid just because I like the shape, my wife or kids might look and see a bit of trash or some kids toy on a shop shelf but I'm looking at the actual shape of it or the shape of some sub part of it and thinking "You know what , that would make a brilliant looking space ship" or something..

I think it's all about Inspiration, does not matter what your source is as long as it gives you a cool idea for a design or style.

And Gar thanks for letting me know I'm not the only one lol.