The Escapist Artist Honored

Every week here at The Escapist, Team Humidor hunts down the finest game writing available from the finest game writers, and edits, rearranges and publishes it in the magazine for your reading pleasure. We've been doing this for about two years now, and we've been getting a lot of praise from industry professionals, our peers and others.

But a large part of that praise is due to the fine men and woman who read every article, then search out pictures, graphics and photos they can use to make our words pretty. Sometimes this is as easy as cropping a photo of Warren Spector with his dog. Other times, it's a task of painstakingly bending images of CCG cards to fit a photo of a man doing a card trick. Sometimes, if they're lucky, they get to play with snowflakes. But every once in a while, they have to make zombies.

Jessica Fielhauer is one of the artists who take that plunge with us every week, and for this week's issue of The Escapist (Issue 98), she was tasked with making art to fit our interview with the creator of Urban Dead, the browser-based zombie game. Since the game is text-based, there was no accompanying art, and sadly, the stock photo archive didn't have any zombies. So what's an artist to do? Well, turn a vampire into a zombie of course.

"I found an image of a man with an expression I felt was right," she says, "and then used photoshop to turn him into a zombie."

iStockphoto has the story of her artistic prowess up on their site, and is featuring her creation as a design spotlight. If you want to see more of Jessica's work, open practically any issue of The Escapist.

Cheers, Jess.

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Good work Jess! :)

Awesome work, Jess :)

Yay Jess! Yay Art Team! You guys always do such a great job making the articles come alive. Thank you.

heehee! thanks guys! It's nice that it was selected, but mostly it was just a lot of fun to do. :)

sprout:
heehee! thanks guys! It's nice that it was selected, but mostly it was just a lot of fun to do. :)

My favorite day last week (at work anyway) was the day I asked you what you were doing and you said "making zombies." Days like that remind me of why this is the best job ever.

I've often been impressed by the art in the Escapist.

I loved the images in Warren Spector's last article.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/issue/94/4

The images immediately expressed to me the infinite possibilities and wonder of storytelling.

Nordstrom:
I loved the images in Warren Spector's last article.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/issue/94/4

The images immediately expressed to me the infinite possibilities and wonder of storytelling.

Agreed! Props to Jason, he did an amazing job on that article!

Is there any way to find out who did the art for particular images in the Escapist? I often want to find out but the credits in the back don't make the specific contributions clear.

Great work Jessica, Jason and anyone else that might be involved!

Nordstrom:
I've often been impressed by the art in the Escapist.

++

I was skeptical of the magazine-style layout at first, but it grew on me really quickly. And thanks to whoever did the layout/art in my article back in Issue 91 -- I thought it looked great in "print!" :)

I don't even read the articles anymore; I just look at the pictures.

Echolocating:
I don't even read the articles anymore; I just look at the pictures.

At least you're honest.

The pictures are a big part of why The Escapist is the only periodical I read with any regularity. The quotes on the side keep me interested through the boring parts of the articles (since I'm usually reading it at work or in class, where I tend to be easily distracted). Like, I'll see the quote, then I'll keep going to the page to see the context in which it was made.

Bravo!

One of my recent faves are those: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/issue/91 & http://www.escapistmagazine.com/issue/94/8.
And I liked how the article "Creative hara-kiri" was smartly illustrated in just two pictures, with some kind of cynical humour about the paper plane crashing.

I'll take the occasion to ask if there's a plan to add a little summary of what an article is about in the headline, or somewhere, maybe at the beginning of said article?
Either by adding a page at the beginning of an issue, or trying to make it fit somewhere on the first page of each article.
I admit sometimes I have to read something like two or three colums, or even a whole page, before understanding the subject of an article, and sometimes it simply detracts me from spending the necessary time to understand what it's about.
The titles are very metaphorical, but this where it looses me as well, as I like my newspaper to be able to tell me what I'm about to read in just one line.

Arbre the one paragraph summaries in the email notice work pretty well to that effect I think. But if you're talking about adding one to the magazine itself, *Shrug* It wouldn't be important to me, but I can see how some might like it. I normally think in magazines it's being used to make you more willing to sort through the 30 advertisements barring your path to the 3 page story you might want to read.