It's been a long time since we have done this: The search for an artist for our new game! A couple of weeks ago, I put out a call and received a lot of applications. Among those, I have picked 5 that I believed to have the most potential considering their ratio of portfolio quality and their pricing to participate in a test commission round.
In addition to those 5 artists, our artist for SKA also approached me that they could hire the assistant they hired some time ago when we were considering hiring a secondary artist full time in order to produce output for 2 projects. This kind of goes against the idea of trying new things for Liora, but on the other hand it also goes with the idea of building up on what we have and using past experiences to improve.
I gave our applying artists access to the game design document, links to the devlog posts here on Patreon, and also expanded that with some more reference material so that they could get to work and design their interpretation of Liora.
With their results now all here, I will be showing what they came up with and you can vote on which artist you prefer. Note that for me all polls are just "advisory". Let's say, artist A and artist B have a lot of votes and B has like 3 more votes than A, but I think A is better to work with, I will be picking A.
The polling will happen in a separate post:https://www.patreon.com/posts/lioras-price-of-129036157
I will also post links to the artist portfolios or if they don't have a linkable webpage some images they used for their application in the Poll post. The reason I won't link them here is because Patreon doesn't like direct link to NSFW webpages.
Before I dive into the results of the application process, I will be giving a quick summary of the brief I gave them for Liora so that you can better evaluate how good they translated that brief into their design.
Liora Brief Summary
I used the character Aria Steelwind from the game Tyrion Cuthbert Attorney of the Arcane as a base (btw a very good Ace Attorney like) as she had a lot of character properties that I had in mind for Liora. The key changes would be for Liora to be more mature than the reference material and equipped with a sexier body.
While Liora is also intelligent, in contrast to Aura, the focus is less on nerdy/dorky and more on confident and serious
Sexy body but no slutty clothing to leave room for the corruption process of wearing sluttier clothing for the future
Morally strong, prudish, uptight, evoking the desire to see her corrupted
Furthermore, I gave them a link to Star Knightess Aura so that they could see in the screenshots how the character sprites would be used (facing slightly towards the viewer, but not directly, with their gaze directed to the other potential speaker in the scene).
As an additional note: The character designs below are not final. I gave our artists some feedback in case they strayed too far from the brief (mostly since everyone was immediately submitting highly sexualized clothing :'D which however goes against the flow of the sexual corruption). Otherwise I mostly let them do their things. After we have chosen the artist, I plan to have the selected artist iterate their design before we move forward to making additional artwork.
Now, to the results. In addition to the character design, I also asked the artists to create 4 expressions: Base, Angry, Embarrased, Lewd. For each artist, I will be posting the results, the price and how long they took. If there is anything special to remark, I will also add a note.
Applicant 1: Deniis
Price: 110 USDDelivery Time: 9 DaysNote: A bit pink on the colors but something that can be easily adjusted.
Applicant 2: Emubi
Price: 320 USDDelivery Time: 7 DaysNote: SKA's artist, Emubi and their assistant. They were working on this in parallel to the recent Richard Sex 3 H-CG. I don't think there is anything else to remark, it's our previous artist with both his strengths and flaws.
Applicant 3: Nirainini
Price: 180 USD (+50% Commercial License) = 270 USDDelivery Time: 8 Days
Applicant 4: Vane
Price: 160 USDDelivery Time: 6 DaysNote: I don't think the quality is there, which wasn't unexpected, due to their low pricing, which enabled me to commission them with expression dependent poses. Sadly you don't quite see it, but I didn't want to change the presentation format for this submission that will definitely not be chosen.
Applicant 5: Vourem
Price: 245 USD (+50% Commercial License) = 367 USDDelivery Time: 11 DaysNote: The last artist to deliver - after I kept asking them to give me a estimated delivery date, and them telling me "tomorrow" a couple of times. In their application they said it would take 1 - 5 days for such a commission, so I have some concerns regarding their reliability. The background is grey instead of white as the anger effect was invisible on the white background.
Applicant 6: Weekun
Price: 80 USDDelivery Time: 2 DaysNote: The delivery is quite removed from the brief. I admit that this is partially my fault as I did not sufficiently correct the artist - I didn't expect them to move so quickly to the shading stage. Since there was a lot off from the initial brief, I couldn't quickly reply to them and had to create a longer list, but by then they had already moved ahead and finished. I think this one is off my list because of the weak communication here, they didn't seem to properly process the brief material and so I decided to just leave the result as is and, well, they will be on the poll for completions sake, but I won't be considering them.
Feel free to let me know what you think of the applicants not just in the comments but also in Discord where we have a dedicated post in #commissions for the artist search.