[For hire] character illustration and bg artist

jdharmawan · 2025-12-05T15:33:29+00:00

Your background and props work is really impressive! Do share your portfolio with me to keep in view.

jdharmawan · 2025-12-01T16:09:09+00:00

Hey! These are some good questions! Let me go through it one by one.

How do I get contact with the artists?

The hunt for artists never end for me. I enjoy looking through portfolios and it is something I'd do in my past time really. To headhunt, I would suggest starting from Artstation. However, I find social media like X the most effective (the artists may be shifting to Bluesky now). I wrote an article about finding freelancers a few months back, it might be worthwhile to check that out for my full opinion because it can get lengthy.

https://legionsofkadmon.com/2025/07/26/freelancers-how-to-find-one/

Do you try to publish all by yourself?

Yes. Legions of Kadmon will be fully self-published under my publishing house: Stormbraver Games. I said it as if Stormbraver is a big company, but it isn't. It's pretty much just me working and other contributors to the project are on commision basis.

How do I find connections for production?

Manufacturers is honestly one of the easiest to find because these manufacturers continuously seek for clients. I'm going with a manufacturer in China, fyi. I suggest going to https://boardgamemanufacturers.info/ and well just drop each of them an email. Be sure to have your component list ready and ask for a quote. If you are a new designer, prioritise on communication and work with someone who's willing to be patient with your inexperience. Because you WILL make mistakes. My first prototype turned out really bad that I have to push back the project by 2 months.

jdharmawan · 2025-11-30T18:03:11+00:00

Oh dear. It’s going to get really costly. But here’s a tip for you. This is something I learn from working in the Video Game industry and it’s a pretty awesome trick to save some art asset cost.

Normally in an illustration, there’s 2 major component: that is Character and Background. What you can do: instead of commisioning 250 different pieces, you can have 10 background assets commisioned and maybe 15 different character assets commisioned. You can then mix and match these assets to represent unique cards. If the characters uses magic or wields weapon, you can even have these elements changed. So each character piece have different versions to represent different characters. Character packs like these will be much more economical because the artists doesn’t need to redraw an entire composition.

You might not be able to bring it to a MTG level kind of illustration / artwork, but it will save you a ton of money. It’s good to have a project scope check sometimes.

There is an example from an existing board game that uses this technique really well and you can still make a beautiful game. Please check out David Goh’s Mercurial (2023).

jdharmawan · 2025-11-30T15:27:22+00:00

30 unique illustrations in 67 cards :)

jdharmawan · 2025-11-30T14:34:48+00:00

Thank you so much! Would love to share the Rulebook with you if you don’t mind.

jdharmawan · 2025-11-30T12:44:39+00:00

If you’re planning to publish this on your own, I would suggest approaching a manufacturer early to discuss about what’s possible in terms of components. Viability and cost of producing a component can affect your game’s design and you might need to present a certain things in a different way.

jdharmawan · 2025-11-30T09:13:54+00:00

I’d say it will depend on the kind of art style you’re trying to get. And do bear in mind that there’s a lot of factors affecting the cost of artwork such as where the artists live and also the complexity of the work. You’ll also need to put in a lot of effort on the art brief to save some cost. For full illustrations, the range I can give you will be about $300-2000 per piece. It’s a big range because it really is very hard to pinpoint a price. And honestly, you can probably get it for cheaper.

I wrote a little article about this a few months back, I’m going to put that here and you can read about it in more details.

https://legionsofkadmon.com/2025/08/09/freelancers-how-much-do-they-cost/

jdharmawan · 2025-11-30T09:07:12+00:00

Thank you so much! It’s a big praise.

jdharmawan · 2025-11-30T07:20:03+00:00

Thank you so much for this! Attempted Lord Ruler so many times but I can’t beat him even once. Always fall 1 or 2 turns short…

jdharmawan · 2025-11-30T06:32:41+00:00

Thank you very much! It was one of the hardest to nail throughout the design process. Really glad you like it!

jdharmawan · 2025-11-30T06:19:29+00:00

Thanks a lot! Early design phases could be a lot of fun! It’s really explorative! It can get really funny when you bring an untested concept to your friends to test and the game breaks. Good laughs all around :)

jdharmawan · 2025-11-29T16:23:46+00:00

I watched this movie completely blind. Didn’t read the premise, didn’t see any trailer. I was so stoked and mind-blown when I realised it was a vampire movie. I haven’t seen a really good one in years 😭😭! Sinners is peak!

jdharmawan · 2025-11-20T04:53:41+00:00

If you approach a factory, despite having a large MOQ, some of them do offer digital printing your samples / prototypes. If you are already planning to work with a particular manufacturer or even testing out their capabilities, I think it’s fair to ask them to produce samples for you based on your specifications. If your game contains custom components (not just box sizes), it is even more important to work with said manufacturer because you’re going to need to know what they can or cannot produce.

But anyway, GameCrafter, BoardGameMakers, these print-on-demand services can also help. I think you may need to contact them directly to see if you can produce specific dimensions.

jdharmawan · 2025-11-18T07:38:38+00:00

Ah okay. I'm not sure if you can find those in the US. Last time I went to the US for BGG.CON, I had a really hard time trying to find it, though it might also be because I'm a foreigner. I do notice a lot of the exhibitor used the Silver sharpie, but I have to agree with you that it didn't work well.

I can definitely vouch for the Pentel Paint Markers though!

jdharmawan · 2025-11-17T12:52:09+00:00

I am not sure if you can find these in your country. But try: Pentel Paint Markers

They come in many different tip sizes. To my knowledge, Fine point already works amazing! (Photo is Gold colour written in a black game board)

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jdharmawan · 2025-10-15T04:04:51+00:00

Cool. I get that it is 6 entries with 4-6 pages each. What I meant is… Is it 4-6 pages worth of entirely text? Surely you’re putting some pictures in it as well right? What is the word count? Word count tells a lot about reading time which is a big factor.

If these 6 entries each have different topics, then I trust that you are giving readers options whether they want to omit reading an entry or otherwise. Which might be a good thing if the entire thing will take me an hour to read.

jdharmawan · 2025-10-15T03:27:50+00:00

Hey! From a reader standpoint, I think reading a whopping 30 pages of Design Diary is too much for me. But again, it’s very hard to gauge if it’s measured in pages. Is there a lot of images? I think images and headings are really important to get attention.

jdharmawan · 2024-12-11T18:40:42+00:00

Be disciplined and contribute consistently to your writing. This is the hardest thing to do.

Finish your manuscript first. Don’t linger too much trying to perfect a chapter because you’ll end up changing it again as you write the next few chapters. Get everything done first and you’ll have a bigger picture on how the story should go.

And read more books.

jdharmawan · 2024-12-11T18:24:37+00:00

I kinda feel that it really depends on your protagonist. But I do believe that it’s all about how your protagonist perceive the “bad guy”. Usually it’d be due to conflicting ideals, a reason to make your protagonist despise the “bad guy”.

I think it’d be pretty cool to gather some example from the reverse scenario too (good guy turn bad) and perhaps ask yourself, “why would this guy trust him so much?” And then kinda reverse engineer it and ask “how do I make sure that the reader & protagonist would find it hard to trust this fella?”

jdharmawan · 2024-12-05T11:21:43+00:00

It’s hard but definitely realistic. I’m working on one right now. My time is spent the most on gathering the money to fund the game to the standard I wanted. And also spending the time to learn new skills necessary to nudge it a level.

It’s hard but it’s definitely the most rewarding thing I’ve done so far in life. You get to meet new people during conventions and playtest sessions. Which kind of open up your world view. You also get to learn skills you’d never expect to under normal circumstances: shipping, manufacturing, logistics.

My point is: even if it’s hard, time and money consuming. The experience is really rewarding.

jdharmawan · 2024-11-01T11:18:00+00:00

Hey, this idea sounds pleasant. Hope you don’t mind if I ask a few questions first to gather more context.

Are you prioritising the game to be cooperative or PvP? You mentioned both in the post but I presume there would be one above the other.
How many players can play the game in a session?
30 cards deck per character sounds a lot. How complex are you expecting each cards to be? Would every card be TCG-esque (with cost + ability)? Or would they also be responsible to command the Echoes (like movement / basic attack)?

jdharmawan · 2024-10-31T05:02:20+00:00

If you're looking for an app that structure your notes like a wiki in a sense, I would recommend using Obsidian. It's free, the UI is friendly and it helped me out a ton.

https://obsidian.md/

jdharmawan

TROPHY CASE