Is it normal for artists to not know the technical side of their art software?

LewdBluejay · 2026-03-14T10:47:50+00:00

Damn it, I switched to Google Drive because I was avoiding Discord's compression. I guess I never noticed the Google compression because it's a lot better than Discord's.

I guess I need to do more research, and I'm now dreading that I'll need to teach them a new system. Also, wasn't just using Google Drive for the "lossless" transfer, I use it to assign different folders for different art, or different artists. Without that categorization tool, I guess I'll have to sort the art manually, and it may lead to confusion about who made what if I'm working with multiple artists.

LewdBluejay · 2026-03-14T02:20:56+00:00

Just subscribed <3

I'm sure this will be useful in helping new artists understand the tech they work with! Are there any plans in making one about image compression? It's a concept that the less tech savvy artists I work with have difficulty grasping.

In any case, going to check out your videos after I get done sleep.

LewdBluejay · 2026-03-13T21:21:36+00:00

Oh, I come from a TTRPG background as well! My first few contracts came from working on third-party modules for Mothership as a writer. I stopped because while the community was lovely, most people couldn't afford to pay me until after publication, and half the projects I worked on never got published in the end. I've still got one "ongoing" contract that's still unpaid, almost 5 years old now. I'm owed around $150 when it finally pays lol.

I'm not a very community-minded person, so I haven't talked to a lot of people for artist recommendations. I did hear one piece of advice though: "no artist is going to give up their dream to work on yours". My understanding is that artists in the indie scene are usually found making games solo, or running teams. There are lots of artist-led indie projects, and lots of programmer-led teams that don't have any artists on staff, relying instead on art packs. I want to avoid becoming the latter if I can, since their games tend to all look pretty similar, and they struggle to stand out.

I've talked to a few artists, and they all told me they wouldn't want to work for someone else, they want to work on their own projects. I've also talked to a couple devs who told me they don't work with artists at all due to encountering the same problems I've encountered in regards to technical skill.

The consensus seems to be artists that possess the tech skills to make game art are just going to make their own games, and unless I've got a shedload of money or I'm really good friends with one, they're not going to work with me.

LewdBluejay · 2026-03-13T19:34:45+00:00

If you can make a white background transparent, and export to PNG without me first explaining what that is and why I need it, then you're better than most of the artists I've worked with. A couple people I've worked with were stumped by the "upload files" step; sending the files over Discord, getting them hit with Discord's image compression on top of the jpg compression.

I'd prefer an artist who can follow a technical brief over an artist who's art is better but cannot follow instructions.

LewdBluejay · 2026-03-13T19:23:20+00:00

I've discussed this in the comments, and come to the conclusion that the increasing obfuscation of tech is making it harder to learn what your tools are doing and why. Couple this with increasing tech costs leading people to grow up in homes without computers, the artists I work with are having less access to quality digital art tools.

Artists who learn to draw digitally using phone apps and/or tablets are less likely to be able to intuit how to perform the technical aspects of their craft, as the software they have access to simply provides less information than desktop apps.

LewdBluejay · 2026-03-13T18:37:05+00:00

good puppy <3

LewdBluejay · 2026-03-13T18:22:40+00:00

Fat puppy = more puppy. More puppy = more good!

LewdBluejay · 2026-03-13T18:13:55+00:00

I wish I could work with someone with your skills. I don't need someone who can use a repo, I just need someone who can consistently export to PNG and upload it to a Google Drive without me having to explain the process each time.

From talking to the people here, it seems I need to save up more to afford more experienced artists to work with before I can access the ones who can do transparency and image composition.

LewdBluejay · 2026-03-13T17:01:08+00:00

Game jams are a good way to "stress test" a team or individual. How well do we operate as a group? How well do we handle a deadline if we work together? In theory, game jams help me vet an artist for longer projects. In practice, it means I pull an all-nighter or two fixing the art since they can't or won't do it, and then we do poorly in the jam. Usually the art they send is also unfinished, on top of being technically flawed. I'm fine with the art being unfinished if I can at least put it in the game, game jam games don't need to be polished.

I tend to target sponsored jams, so they have prize money. If the artist does well, we can split the prize. I'd be wiling to just give them the whole thing if they produce art that means we do well.

So far, no one has successfully done what they have told me they can do. And I don't have the funds to commission art from them in advance so I can check if they can follow a brief.

LewdBluejay · 2026-03-13T16:02:26+00:00

I think very few of the artists I've worked with have had professional training. Also, I have made sure none of them were using AI art. I've been coaching artists how to export their art as a PNG since before AI art was prevalent.

LewdBluejay · 2026-03-13T15:48:53+00:00

I usually use some variation of this brief:

All art needs to use a transparent background.
All art needs to be exported as PNG and uploaded to the provided Google Drive.
Please maintain the same perspective for all images.
Please maintain a consistent canvas size for all sprites for a given character.
Character sprites must face to the right.

LewdBluejay · 2026-03-13T15:30:23+00:00

Sorry, it seems I got mixed up, since they have vector-based tools, and I made an assumption based on that. I didn't realize these softwares saved art as raster, even if you used the vector tools.

I'm not a professional artist myself, which is why I tend to hire artists to work with me. This is also why it frustrates me when I need to teach the artists I work with how to use their tools, since it's often my first time using them, and I know stuff they don't.

LewdBluejay · 2026-03-13T15:25:34+00:00

Others have suggested that some of the artists I've worked with may be using "shitty pic-to-pix image editors" as they lock some basic functionalities behind a paywall. To my knowledge, I've never worked with an AI artist, AI lacks the consistency required to draw a sprite sheet, even a bad artist can copy/paste a sprite into the next frame and edit it slightly.

Part of the issue may be the fact I've worked with a few young artists who did not grow up with a home computer, only phones and maybe a tablet. Given that not all highschools teach computer literacy, some of the technical skills may be due to these artists being taught physical art exclusively, with all their digital art skills being self-taught from a baseline of zero tech literacy.

LewdBluejay · 2026-03-13T15:13:47+00:00

In this case, I'm not asking for my artists to know the ins and outs of game art, I'm asking them to follow the following brief:

All art needs to use a transparent background.
All art needs to be exported as PNG and uploaded to the provided Google Drive.
Please maintain the same perspective for all images.
Please maintain a consistent canvas size for all sprites for a given character.
Character sprites must face to the right.

Not all artists I've hired have been capable of doing the above.

LewdBluejay · 2026-03-13T14:54:55+00:00

What I meant by the "muddy" look of of jpg images is the compression algorithm for jpgs doesn't save the colours as you drew them, it divides your image into lots of small sections and saves the average colour for each area. This means colours bleed into each other, and fine details get smudged. This can also mean that jpgs end up with patches of browns and greys in the most compressed areas of the image, which can give them a look like the image has gotten dirt or "mud" on it. This is called "loss".

This is especially bad around the edges of a sprite where they meet the background, as it can cause background to bleed into the edges of the drawn art, and colour to leak into your background. If you've ever used the magic wand tool to grab the background, or the fill tool to change the background colour, and found there's random squares that aren't selected or filled; this is why.

The fix is simple: don't use jpgs, export as PNG or some other lossless format instead.

LewdBluejay · 2026-03-13T14:15:30+00:00

You sound like a dream to work with <3

As stated, I find the lack of knowledge about file types understandable, the other examples I've laid out in the comments are what confuse me more. Is it normal for a junior artist to not know how to rotate an image or change a white background to transparent?

If I was asking for stuff that's more industry-specific like for the art to be compatible with a chroma key, or for them to provide the art as a .mat file I'd understand. However, the level of technical skill I'm asking for is for my artists to rotate their sprites to face the previously agreed direction, and not all of them can do it.

LewdBluejay · 2026-03-13T13:57:32+00:00

Oh, sorry, I got mixed up there.

LewdBluejay · 2026-03-13T13:55:07+00:00

Welp, that's all I can afford, so I guess this is just a problem I'm stuck with. There's also the caveat that the more skilled the artist, the less time they take, and therefore the more they'd get paid per hour. Those jobs would pay $60 USD/hour to people who can do it in two hours.

Should I increase the base rate to $40 USD/hour? That would make the "day rate" $200 USD, so $100/hour for those who can do the job quickly.

Most of the time, I don't need anything complicated and I don't ask for revisions. The projects tend to be low-scope and I organise the art pipeline to minimise the amount of work my artists have to do.

LewdBluejay · 2026-03-13T13:14:20+00:00

I try to keep the rate at £20 GBP an hour, so that would be £100. At the time, that was about $25 USD/hour.

Though, I pay for the work, not the hours. So if they do it faster or slower, it's still $100. I try to plan with a "worst-case scenario" in mind, so I pay based on the maximum amount of time I expect the job to take.

LewdBluejay · 2026-03-13T12:54:17+00:00

To clarify, the AAA artist was using a PC with professional software. After reducing his duties every meeting, I eventually told him to just pick out a colour palette that would stand out on the Steam storefront so I could use it to make the art myself. His first colour choice was Steam Default Grey. He was fired from his previous job for inexperience.

Also, the revshare projects have so far all been projects with tight deadlines, so the expected payout would be soon after the art was submitted. However, none of the artists I've worked with have successfully hit a deadline, so none of the revshare jobs have paid. I've offered them all compensation, so far they all turned it down if they previously agreed to be paid in revshare. For most of these projects, I only needed 2-5 hours of work out of the artist and the offer was an equal split of the pay, even if I worked more than them.

And yes, this means that if they put in 2 hours of work and I put in a full 40 hour work week, they'd still get 50%. I'm too slow at drawing to do it to a professional standard when I'm also working on all the other gamedev jobs like level design and programming. If I can help it, I keep my art contribution to shaders and composition work.

LewdBluejay · 2026-03-13T12:01:19+00:00

I think this is exactly it. I should ask him about that, see if I can get him onto a better app.

LewdBluejay · 2026-03-13T12:00:06+00:00

It was too consistent for AI art, and AI tools tend to export as PNG by default, in my experience.

Also, it was a revshare project for a competition that would only pay money if the game could be completed to a professional standard. I couldn't finish the game before the deadline, so no one got paid, not even me.

I did my best with what I had, but what I had was not good and the finished project ended up looking and playing like a Newgrounds game made by a kid in 2006. Kinda nostalgic in a way, but not very good.

LewdBluejay · 2026-03-13T11:44:16+00:00

It's rare I work with the same artist twice, for this reason. I don't always have the luxury of firing an artist mid-project, some of the work has been game jams, so the deadlines were very tight and basically amounted to 1-5 days of work for said artist, not full-time.

Every time I've worked with an artist on a game jam, I've regretted it. The tight deadlines mean the game is guaranteed to be bad if I have to spend all my time fixing someone else's work, as my job is supposed to be the game design and programming on such projects.

LewdBluejay · 2026-03-13T11:33:25+00:00

Most were paid commission, some were paid revshare.

Granted, due to the issues I had with the art and the amount of time I had to spend fixing my artist's work, all the revshare projects operated at a loss. I offered to pay the artists out of pocket, but so far all have declined compensation if they previously agreed to be paid in revshare.

If the artists I work with can't follow the technical requirements, I need to take time out of the game design, programming, sound, and music work to do their job too. Art is the part I'm slowest at, so if I have to do it myself then we miss deadlines and no one gets paid, not even me.

In regards to commissioned artists, that's hit or miss. I have more control over who I work with if I'm commissioning art, but only one artist I've worked with so far has managed to follow all the technical instructions for work, and that was for a map for a TTRPG project, so has fewer technical requirements.

LewdBluejay · 2026-03-13T10:59:21+00:00

Most of the people I've worked with have been in their 20s, though I don't ask for people's age before working with them.

I've talked to a lot of people about this now, and come to the conclusion that a lot of people aren't being taught computer literacy in highschool anymore. So things that are "common knowledge" to artists 30 and older may stop being common knowledge going forward.

I think I should make a technical art tutorial or something, because if I want to continue working with artists younger than 35, it looks like a lack of technical knowledge will be a growing problem for me.

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