Art jobs in the game industry: become a game artist yourself
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#Development Tips
#Recruiting
10.06.2022
#Game design
Art of Personal Branding for Game Artist
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Are you a Game Artist looking to establish a strong personal brand? In this article, we’ll explore the art of personal branding specifically tailored for Game Artists. From understanding the fundamentals to nurturing your online presence, this guide will help you unlock the power of personal branding in the game industry. So, let’s dive in and elevate your artistic career to new heights.
Table of contents:
- What is a Personal Brand in general?
- How can Personal Branding benefit you as a Game Artist?
- How long does it take to build a Personal Brand for a Game Artist?
- Where to start? – Personal Branding for Artists
- Building Foundations of Game Artists’ Personal Branding – 10 steps
- Nurture your online presence
What is a Personal Brand in general?
Before we delve into the world of Game Artists, let’s address some misconceptions and establish clear definitions first.
Personal Brand is not YOU. It’s others’ perception of your persona.
Simply put: it’s what people speak about you when you leave the room.
The trick is that even if you’re not consciously building your Personal Brand as an Artist, ppl still have some opinions about you. How? Simple! If you work with people, they all have an impression of your work style ethics of even your art style. They have opinions about whether you were a team player or not.
The only people who should not be bothered about building a personal brand are those living on a deserted island.
So you have a choice – you can either leave it the way it is, or you can meticulously design how your brand can be seen by others.
A personal brand can be built with an online presence and offline engagement, like going to the industry events, hanging out with gamedev buddies, etc.
And now, something that might be an ultimate argument for why you should work on your personal brand.
You might have the best skills in the world, but if no one knows about it – it doesn’t matter. So you need to PUT YOURSELF OUT THERE.
How can Personal Branding benefit you as a Game Artist?
- You won’t have to apply to the job offers by yourself
We all know that applying to job ads takes a lot of time. Design a Resume, write a cover letter, write tons of emails, and then hope for the best.
The sweet thing about building a reputation is that it’s doing the heavy work for you. If you’re known in the community as an artist with a specific art style. If you’re known for your attention to detail. Or, for your speed in creating awesome and jaw-dropping concept arts or illustrations, people will knock on your door, wanting to work with you.
- Freelance gigs and art commissions
Who doesn’t want to take on an exciting or challenging art project, right?
Assuming that your style might be recognizable by certain people, once in a while, your inbox might be filled with incoming freelance gigs, paid with cash. Who knows? Maybe in the future, you would like to shift from having a full-time job and going freelance instead? It’s good to start working on that.
- Selling art courses and tutorials
Or maybe you have got a knack for educating ppl. If you’re into teaching people art, you need to build a presence to be able to sell your service.
And then who knows? Maybe you’ll have a sweet source of a passive income, and your viewers can level up their art skills in return?
How long does it take to build a Personal Brand for a Game Artist?
You probably know that it’s a time-consuming process, and we’re looking at the long-term game. Listen, building and maintaining a reputation
is a long-term strategy.
Assuming that you’re starting from scratch, you need to build the fundamentals of your branding and then work hard on building strong and meaningful relationships.
Where to start? – Personal Branding for Artists
So let’s dig into the Fundamentals of building Artists’ Branding.
Without these, it will be tough to build a powerful personal brand for game artists, so lemme guide you through these 10 most crucial steps, okay?
Building Foundations of Game Artists’ Personal Branding – 10 steps
1. What do you want to achieve? Define your personal goal?
Remember when we discussed the benefits? So you need to define what you want to achieve by having a strong artist’s personal brand. Is it a new job? Or maybe you want a steady source of passive income thanks to the online courses?
2. Who do you want to help by sharing your content? Who is the audience, and how can your expertise make their life easier?
This step is mostly about defining your content’s target audience and looking into the problem you could try to solve with your work.
Artists are tricky, though. Sometimes, it can be as simple as “I just want to show my work.” But maybe, there’s more to it?
It’s worth to look. It can give you an additional edge.
3. Find your niche
This is the time when you need to do some research on your direct competition (meaning other game artists). And by that, I mean checking what kind of stuff your art friends are doing. For example, what type of content are they sharing? Progresses? Animated WIPs of your finished pieces? Or maybe the way they communicate is specific? How?
4. What can make you stand out from the crowd?
Hopefully, you’ve done some research and come to some conclusions. What I need you to do rn is to think about ways to stand out from the crowd. Understand what makes your brand unique. What is this secret ingredient that other artists might lack?
5. Define your brand’s values
What do you want to be recognized specifically for? Here you can find a list of example brand values.
6. Define your brand’s boundaries
Making a decision about the things you want to participate in helps to give off a certain perception of your persona. But you know what else works perfectly? Setting up some boundaries. Listing what kind of content, what themes you’re not gonna cover. What variety of topics and discussions do you want to avoid.
7. What is your story? – Journey of an artist
People are drawn to captivating and inspiring stories. Think about your journey as an artist. What made you take this path? How did you progress throughout the years?
8. Pick your Game Artist brand’s vibe and voice
Formal and cold professionalism? Or maybe fun and quirkiness?
You must define which type of communication suits your brand the most.
Here, read about 12 brand archetypes. This might be a perfect go-to tool to build your brand’s personality.
9. Create an elevator pitch for an Artist
Imagine you’re at E3 or GDC. Someone comes to you and asks: “Hey, what do you do?”. You need to have a short and catchy response to that. “I draw stuff” might not be exciting enough. 😉
Here are some tips on building a catchy elevator pitch.
10. Create content that provides value
I mentioned that your art speaks for itself, but today’s reality of online presence is ruled by algorithms. And algorithms respond directly to the way people consume content. So if you want that attention, seek out specific formats that show you backstage and your creative process. You can share some tips that would help grow aspiring artists like you.
Ok, so what next?
Nurture your online presence
Oh yeah, something where the fun begins. Setup the accounts on the channels and social media platforms you want to showcase your work. Remember to be consistent with the name you’re going with. So if you’re Mike on Instagram, don’t change it to Michael on Linkedin. The same goes for your profile picture. Make yourself recognizable straight away.
Artstation
As a Game Artist, this is a no-brainer, right? But the key to personal branding is consistency. So go there. Update your Artstation portfolio as often as you can. Various media and formats support that goes with the Artstation is insane. Make use of it. Showcase the steps of your process.
Visual content, which is your forte is perfect for this platform. Use of Reels and Stories for stand-out social media presence. Document your journey as Game Artist and your creative process. Engage with other artists.
TikTok
TikTok is still a quite fresh social media channel. It’s still easy to get views for your content if you can think of how to present your stuff so it can suit what people like to watch there. I’ve seen plenty of artists who used this platform to showcase their art. I guess that due to the virality it’s good to at least test out the potential that goes with this platform when it comes to branding yourself as an artist.
LinkedIn might be a place perceived as a network full of motivational BS, I know. But it’s also one of the best places to look for meaningful business connections and partnerships.
Besides, LinkedIn is a huge search engine. So a well-tailored profile helps you to be found by the right people.
And if you’re curious about how made your profile better discoverable, read these:
Building your personal brand on LinkedIn – how to do it and why you should care?
Your personal Game Artist portfolio
I can’t stress enough how crucial it is for you to keep your work on your own artist’s website.
You never know what can happen on someones else’s platform. The policy might change; they can sell the service to someone else (you know who I’m talking about ;)), and you might lose your account because of reasons. On your own site, you can show whatever you feel is relevant.
So here we go! I guess that with the knowledge we presented here, you’re pretty well equipped to go on an exciting journey of building your strong brand as an artist!
And please, If you have any questions about building a Personal Brand for Game Artists or about steering your career path – slide into our DM’s
We’ll be happy to help!