A Blank Canvas

Artistically Speaking

While Cheyenne Wright could get higher paying work elsewhere (he did a T-shirt design for Food TV's geek god Alton Brown that paid his rent for a year), he continues to illustrate for games. He stays with it for the reason most people in the tabletop industry do: merely for the love of it. "That's the big secret of the game industry," Wright says. "All of us could be off doing bigger, 'better' things. But we love games. So we stay long past the point of total sanity loss."

Wright does admit that there are things that need fixing in the industry. In Europe, tabletop gaming is much more respected than in America, where the majority of the public still assumes it to be a child's pursuit (although I'd like to see a kid tackle the rules to the massive war game War of the Ring). "I'd like to see the pen-and-paper tabletop game industry get the respect in the States that it has overseas," he says. "I want it to be as big as the video-drone game industry. I'd like to be able to tell people that I do art for games and for them to not immediately assume that I mean videogames. Maybe if we were that big and could pay out that kind of cash, we wouldn't be suffering the brain-drain that we are."

Besides those irritations, Wright wouldn't give it up. Making tabletop art is simply fun. His favorite part is when the art directors give him some leeway on the art.

"Sometimes, I'm brought into a game early enough that not everything is set in stone yet, or sometimes the writer is stuck on ideas," Wright says. "They'll let me just do crazy design work. I just draw characters and monsters all day, sending the writer sketches and getting to see how my art changed the game.

"I did art for a game called Rippers, which was about Victorian monster hunters. One sketch I did early on was of a Victorian lady in a big poofy dress, wearing a skull mask and carrying a pepper-pot pistol. It was just a weird little idea, but the writer really liked it and folded it into the game's mythology. By the time the game came out they even had a 28mm figure of her sculpted."

Since most gamers want to know the big secret to getting into the industry, Wright has a bit of advice: "If this is what you want to do, do it! Don't be afraid to show your stuff around. There is always going to be someone out there that is better than you, but there [are] also 20 guys worse than you getting steady work."

We're not yet to the point that art is used as currency the same way salt once was, but like salt, game art adds spice that we'd sorely miss if it wasn't there. What would gaming be like without visuals of our bizarre Liberace candy-makers, our Mexican wrestlers and our nightmare-inducing elder gods to spark our imaginations? Thanks to the work of people like Wright, Ernest and Milberger, we won't have to find out.

Mur Lafferty is a freelance writer and podcast producer. She has dabbled in as much gaming as possible, from her website work at Red Storm Entertainment to her RPG writing for White Wolf Publishing. Currently she writes freelance for several gaming publications and produces three podcasts: Geek Fu Action Grip, I Should Be Writing and Pseudopod: the Horror Podcast Magazine. She lives in Durham, NC.