Please keep it up! And please spread it around as much as possible! Showing what we want in such a positive, productive, and visible manner is one of the most powerful forms of advocacy out there. And when folks keep posting artwork of their dark-skinned blood elves, Blizzard has to take notice eventually.
Locking certain ethnicities out of the loop in fantastic race representation has been a problem for a long time and not just in Warcraft land. From novels to traditional pen-and-paper RPGs, all too often elves and the other assorted “goodly type” races get represented exclusively as fair-skinned. It’s long past time for that to stop being the norm. And the only way it can ever get better is to keep eroding the arbitrary barriers some put in place about “canon” or “tradition” or….cripes…”mythic resonance” and have our fun anyway.
So to those that are making artwork available for these characters: Thank you. 🙂
So think of how kitties express themselves with their ears: straight back when they’re angry or afraid, perk up when alert, and relax when they’re tired or happy.
Belf ears bounce and droop in-game but any actual muscle control rests at the base, just like humans (and cats! lotta animals in general lol).
wow my brother was telling me this joke and he said
“if you’re fighting with a woman and she pulls a knife on you, just pull out the bread and cheese and meat and her womanly instincts will kick in and she’ll just make you a sandwich”
then all of a sudden our mom emerges from the kitchen holding a huge ass knife and she approaches my brother asking “sorry what was that?” and he started screaming
If you’re reading this, most likely you have found yourself staring down the gun barrel of a commission/project estimate. You are probably nervous and afraid that you are going to overcharge and scare away a client.
I’m going to do my best to explain how I determine estimates, and hopefully you will find this information useful!
Artist’s Guilt
Before I get into estimating, I want to address what a lot of people have dubbed “artist’s guilt”. This feeling is very common among creatives and it is basically the side effect of doing something you love to do as a profession. Not only do you feel awkward/guilty for charging for something that you’ve probably done since you were a toddler, you also have to explain the value of your work to someone that may view your profession as childish or easy.
When you start feeling the twinges of guilt, remember that you are a professional. You have the right to enjoy your work and to be paid (properly) for it. You create and design what in most cases is the identity of a product. If you are a character artist in the game industry, your character designs will be what initially catches someone’s eye and those players will recognize the product based solely on you or your team’s designs. That has very real and tangible value!
If you design logos for companies/products, you are literally creating their brand. That’s insanely valuable and extremely important!
Artists are important, you are important.
Remember, if you don’t properly value your work then you cannot expect a client to value it either.
Estimating
*Expenses*
Whether you are doing commissions on the side or you are a full-time freelancer, estimating your commissions/rates should be treated in the same manner. Expenses like electricity, equipment, health insurance MUST be considered. Your clients won’t be covering any of this stuff, so it is all on you.
Keep in mind that these expenses aren’t luxuries, they are necessary for you to accomplish your task(s). It is your right to have access to all of that and you should never feel bad about considering them when doing your estimates.
*Rates*
To determine your rates, a solid starting point would be to use sites like indeed.com or glassdoor.com to see what people in your area and in your given field are making on average, and then adjust based on your own experience, keeping in mind that these salaries are taken from people that are working at companies that provide health insurance, electricity, equipment etc. Your hourly rates/estimates will be a bit higher for that reason.
If you live in a rural area, estimate based on the nearest and biggest city and then meet somewhere in middle, since the cost to live is most likely a bit lower in rural towns.
Conclusion
Just like most things in life, educating yourself is key. Not only will you be able to confidently make estimates, you will be able to explain your cost with confidence to clients that may not readily understand the value of what you do. Remember we live in a world where most people think that “the starving artist” is reality, and anyone that lives outside of that bubble has less passion for what they do.
No pay/low pay ≠ passion. That way of thinking is just dumb and irresponsible, it also devalues the actual work required to create things.
Anyway, I hope this helps someone out there!
If you have any questions, feel free to contact me via twitter: @coltavara
OKAY, I’M GOING TO GO BACK TO DRAWING THINGS NOW! *blows up soapbox*
The Doorway Effect: Why your brain won’t let you remember what you were doing before you came in here
I work in a lab, and the way our lab is set up, there are two adjacent rooms, connected by both an outer hallway and an inner doorway. I do most of my work on one side, but every time I walk over to the other side to grab a reagent or a box of tips, I completely forget what I was after. This leads to a lot of me standing with one hand on the freezer door and grumbling, “What the hell was I doing?” It got to where all I had to say was “Every damn time” and my labmate would laugh. Finally, when I explained to our new labmate why I was standing next to his bench with a glazed look in my eyes, he was able to shed some light. “Oh, yeah, that’s a well-documented phenomenon,” he said. “Doorways wipe your memory.”
Being the gung-ho new science blogger that I am, I decided to investigate. And it’s true! Well, doorways don’t literally wipe your memory. But they do encourage your brain to dump whatever it was working on before and get ready to do something new. In one study, participants played a video game in which they had to carry an object either across a room or into a new room. Then they were given a quiz. Participants who passed through a doorway had more trouble remembering what they were doing. It didn’t matter if the video game display was made smaller and less immersive, or if the participants performed the same task in an actual room—the results were similar. Returning to the room where they had begun the task didn’t help: even context didn’t serve to jog folks’ memories.
The researchers wrote that their results are consistent with what they call an “event model” of memory. They say the brain keeps some information ready to go at all times, but it can’t hold on to everything. So it takes advantage of what the researchers called an “event boundary,” like a doorway into a new room, to dump the old info and start over. Apparently my brain doesn’t care that my timer has seconds to go—if I have to go into the other room, I’m doing something new, and can’t remember that my previous task was antibody, idiot, you needed antibody.
