While developing Ameritocracy, there was a moment where something snapped. We turned the corner from just goofing around, to actually deciding to develop a real game. One of the first things we realized was that if we were going to make a great game, we needed great art — art that brought flavor and life to the game. At that time, we had over 80 unique cards. How the heck do you create 80 pieces of art?

If you’re developing a game (or any other creative project) with a story or a world, you might be lost as to how to find artists to bring it to life. We definitely were. Hopefully, our experience can give you a starting point to get out there and find people.

Great art brought our game to life

Keep your illustration count as low as you can

80 may not sound like a large number, but it’s a huge number of illustrations to create. Art isn’t manufactured at scale. Each individual illustration requires love and imagination, and more practically — time, effort, and money.

We needed to downsize a little, so we decided to theme 30 of our cards as newspapers, so they could all use the same art. That cut our total illustration count to 50. Which still was a lot, but at least it was a little more manageable.

Be willing to pay

How much does one custom illustration cost? Well, that depends. But unless you already know a talented illustrator who’s so passionate about your project that they’re willing to work on it for months without pay, I wouldn’t count on it being free. Our experience is that great illustrations cost at least $100 to $200 per illustration.

You can find illustrators who will create full illustrations for less than $50 per illustration though. Our first strategy was to use Google Images to find photos we liked, and have these lower-cost artists create an illustration based on those images. We literally just sent them a photo we found off of Google Images and said, “draw this”.

That didn’t work out very well. Why?

It’s all about style

Because we weren’t trusting our illustrators. We didn’t see illustrators as unique artists, each with their own style. Good illustrators are creative. They’re probably more creative than you are. So find illustrators you trust, with a style you love, then provide them direction, and let them do what they do best.

Lucas surpassed our expectation for how great “Bus in Seniors” could be

So where do you find them?

If you’re looking for illustrators, you should be on the hunt for amazing portfolios. Look at any portfolio you can get your hands on. See what styles you’re gravitating toward. If you admire someone’s work. Tell them! Even if they aren’t the right fit for your project, everyone feels good when they hear someone appreciates their work.

Here are some great places that we’ve found to look:

Board Game Geek Illustrator board

The best part about finding illustrators on the BGG illustrators board is that you can be sure that they’re looking for work, and probably also love board games. That really helps. Illustrators here tend to lean towards being fantasy artists, but sometimes they’re willing to branch out into other types of projects.

Sketch Dailies

Sketch dailies is a site where every day, they post an illustration prompt (examples include Daria, Sharks, Rosie the Riveter, and Darkwing Duck). Over the next day or so, artists submit their take on it. The illustrations are typically amazing and insanely diverse. There’s an illustrator behind every submission. Check out their portfolios.

Also, Sketch Dailies is awesome in it’s own right. Even though we aren’t looking for illustrators any more, I still follow Sketch Dailies just because I like seeing the submissions.

Freelancing sites (like Thumbtack and Upwork)

We also posted requests for illustrators on sites like Thumbtack and Upwork. The average quality on these sites is a little lower, but there are some gem illustrators you can find here, and like the BGG illustrator board, it’s nice to know they’re actively pursuing work.

Another downside is that these sites do a lot of hand holding with the transaction and take a cut of the fee. You really want an illustrator that’s a creative partner, who you can text and email back and forth, rather than simply a transactional contract worker. If you find a great illustrator here, I suggest trying to move off the site to plain ole’ emails as soon as you can.

Twitter and Instagram

Was a great illustrator that you found too expensive? or did they just not have the time to work on your project? Well, great illustrators follow other great illustrators. I just dug through Twitter, seeing who illustrators were following and — you guessed it — looking at their portfolios! You can spot that an account belongs to an illustrator because they’ll usually have an illustration as their profile picture. We found one of our Illustrators this way, and he was friends with another one of our illustrators, which was neat.

accounts one artist follows… a gold mine of talented illustrators.

Even though we were intimidated at first, the process of finding illustrators ended up being surprisingly fun.

Did you find this article helpful? Let me know and I’ll post a follow up on how we worked with the illustrators to create our 45 illustrations.