I’ve more or less finished the prototype of my project and wanted to make a steam demo. Currently, I have AI art placeholders and looked into replacing them with normal art that I’d commission or hire a freelance artist.
I went to several places which are usually recommended here and left posts with the info, what I’m looking for in terms of quality, references and such, and how to apply. I’m not going to talk in detail about the fact that 80% of people can’t read and follow simple instructions of 10 words or less. But even of those who could, the art is just... I don’t know how to phrase it to not sound like a pretentious dick, but damn the art is horrible. And those people are asking in a range of 100-500$ per 2D character sprite. There are even several "professional studios"…
I’ve more or less finished the prototype of my project and wanted to make a steam demo. Currently, I have AI art placeholders and looked into replacing them with normal art that I’d commission or hire a freelance artist.
I went to several places which are usually recommended here and left posts with the info, what I’m looking for in terms of quality, references and such, and how to apply. I’m not going to talk in detail about the fact that 80% of people can’t read and follow simple instructions of 10 words or less. But even of those who could, the art is just... I don’t know how to phrase it to not sound like a pretentious dick, but damn the art is horrible. And those people are asking in a range of 100-500$ per 2D character sprite. There are even several "professional studios" among the applications, and they are really no better.
There were several studios that were somewhat in a range of "I can maybe try to fit it into the game" quality, but most of them asked 1k+ usd per character sprite. Again, the quality wasn’t good, it was around "Well, if there is nothing better..." level of quality.
Among around 70 applications, I chose one studio that had a price tag I might somehow bear (around 500$ per character with several poses), and so far the results are underwhelming. It isn’t bad-bad, it’s not horrible, it’s just meh...
And the main-main-main issue - I like the current AI art much more. Yes, it has artifacts and stuff, yes it’s AI and we need to support artists, but damn it’s much cuter, much nicer, orders of magnitude of higher quality, it has all the elements and details I want...
I also went to artstation and contacted a dozen artists who have "Looking for freelance" in their bio, but none replied (for the clarity, I was just asking "would you be interested in making 2D characters for this project, and how much would you charge per character?").
So I don’t know what to do and how to proceed. The quality I can reach with the artists I managed to contact is way below the level I’d like and also costs an insane amount.
The best solution that comes to mind is just to look for someone who is willing to fix the current AI art’s artifacts... But I’m not sure many people would agree. And even if they did, I’d have to mark the project as AI and it would ruin its chances on steam. In the end, I’d rather have an artist to work with, but I don’t want to compromise too much on the art quality.