#agentcritique

Well that certainly does not seem sustainable!   To me, it sounds like either a very inexperienced team, or a stakeholder with a lot of power changing their minds about what they want.  If this is something they do a lot, it won’t be the first time an artist has left mid-project.  Who knows, maybe they’re used to in-house artists who can iterate eternally if salaried. 

What does your contract say? Depending on your contract, you might need to consider this a hard lesson learned and not be paid at all. Some contracts have a maximum number of revisions before additional compensation is required, but many do not.  In either case, letting them know that you are out of time to work on the project and will need to stop work now if the original brief and style requirements are changing abruptly is not unprofessional.  Be respectful with your phrasing, and you should be fine. If you are feeling especially generous, compromise with “I can make the following alteration, but then I’m done regardless of approval state”. and leave it up to them. 

Sometimes projects spiral, and especially if the vision and direction keep switching, sometimes leaving a project is necessary. It happens. Be proud of yourself for recognizing the situation and doing what you need to!

-Agent Critique

For brand new shiny ADs, absolutely! If you could do everything, you would...do....well, you wouldn’t have the time to do EVERYTHING. But nobody (nobody reasonable, anyways) expects an administrator to be an expert in all areas they administrate, especially at first!  

I should qualify this with saying that the phrase “Art Director” means something different for every industry, and darn near every company and studio. Since you’re dealing with both 2D and 3D I’m assuming you’re in video games or animation, so Imma roll with generally how those industries are put together.

As no doubt you’ve discovered by now (and so many new ADs are surprised at this), there is often very little art making in art direction. It is, very VERY often, a COMPLETELY different skillset from creating art.  (Congratulations on surviving your first year of flinging your body on the most dangerous metaphorical fire to put it out, hey!) Most Art Directors spend the majority of their time communicating, clarifying, and mediating the big picture vision and things like timeline expectations and budgets with the other teams and the stakeholders to manage expectations and clear obstacles so your people can do their jobs without all that back and forth getting underfoot. You’re an ambassador, the voice of your team to other teams, and the voice of everyone else to your team.

Because of that, clarity of communication, being able to define the goalpost and not keep moving it, not necessarily the technical knowledge of how to do every little thing, is what is required of you. So it sounds like you’ve got a leg up; an AD who listens to their team is a great thing!   

-Agent Critique

You are correct! It’s not a contract for work and payment, just an official way for everyone to understand that even if you ultimately turn down the job, the details of the job will still remain confidential. It’s a very common practice when bigger Intellectual Properties are involved.

Agent Critique

Hey Nonnie!  

I cannot think of a single AD who would be upset with an artist they work with also making pieces for stock and licensing. Get that money! Just make sure that you’re not licensing pieces without the correct copyright! (Don’t license pieces you don’t have the license to license.)   

Agent Critique

Pushing yourself is a good thing, but make sure you’re not going to switch styles on your AD or bite off more than you can chew with the given deadline!  Like you said, they hired you for what they saw in your portfolio; that doesn’t mean you can’t give them something more awesome than they anticipated. Make certain you understand what your art is needed for, though, and keep it within those parameters; adding more detail when you’ve been hired for minimalism doesn’t help anyone, and painting in a kickass background isn’t going to be appreciated if a no-background image was commissioned. 

When in doubt, communicate!

-Agent Critique

Here’s the thing. Slow learners are still learning. But what they’re learning that their peers are not necessarily learning is HOW TO KEEP GOING.  It’s very like the really fast kids in high school who never had to study because they already knew everything and then as soon as they hit a bump in college fell apart because they had no idea how to work at it.  Study skills. Persistence.  

As an AD, I’m not looking at age, or even really prior experience, all I need is the work completed in the style I need at the quality I need.

As an educator, an artist who struggles but LISTENS and does the work and applies the feedback and does the research is FUCKING PRICELESS. It’s precious, it’s to be PROTECTED. 

Have you gotten feedback from any working professionals? Sometimes going up to someone who works and also teaches and saying “Hey, I’m struggling, and I think I might be practicing bad habits, can you recommend one thing for me to work on?”

As you’re practicing, make sure to set yourself up for success. Research, reference, repetition, and make sure when you’re doing formal compositions you’re working simply, at least until you’re comfortable. The more elements in an image, the more relationships between elements you have to navigate. So an interesting item portrait in situ with a simple background and good lighting is going to be much easier on you than warriors dueling. 

I make no judgements, Nonny, on whether you decide to stay on your chosen path or not. It’s not an easy thing, for ANYBODY. But no matter what, if you love to draw, keep going, and keep learning <3. 

-Agent Critique

Hey Nonny!

As always, the style that gets hired is gonna be the style that’s appropriate for the project the AD is working on. Editorial doesn’t necessarily have a set style, but it DOES have to convey ideas clearly and at-a-glance.

A big part of what ADs do as far as scouting goes, is predict assignment outcomes. That means they’re using your portfolio and any samples you’ve sent them as a way to triangulate what you’d turn in if they gave you X art brief.  It’s a weird kind of visual algebra, really.

Also keep in mind that even if they make the mental jump of that you COULD do X, they often have to convince another person or group of people OUTSIDE of the art department (this is why we recommend that your pieces are all downloadable and on their own urls, to make it easy to build those pitches). I know of people who have been passed over for Fantasy assignments because they only have Sci-fi in their portfolio…long story short, making the visual algebra as basic and direct as possible is DEFINITELY in your best interest.

It sounds like you already have a style you’d like to make editorial art with; I recommend making some editorial personal pieces to start building an editorial-specific portfolio for your current website. Remember that children have periodicals too!  Perhaps a little research into children’s periodicals and blogs is in order!

-Agent Critique

First of all, NO, DO NOT IGNORE AN EXPRESS REQUEST. Consider it a following-directions test.

There are a few reasons I can think of to request no fan art in an in-house submission, even for a trainee position.

1) They’ve had to deal with litigation in the past.

Book publishers often require authors to avoid fanfiction of their IPs, because in the past some fanfic authors have sued because they believed that the author of the primary work stole their writing for later works.  Game publishers very often don’t want to see the game you built for similar reasons.  It could very well be that Cartoon Network has a blanket policy about fanworks to avoid potential legal trouble down the line.

2) It narrows the application pool. 

A position like this is going to have THOUSANDS of applicants. Adding a parameter like “no fan art” automatically narrows the pool of potential applicants significantly. And although they might miss out on a few artist gems, they’ve weighed that against person-hours going through submissions and decided it’s worth it.  HOWEVER, it says no fan art, but they also request no commercial work, so I think it’s most likely…..

3) They want to see how YOUR brain works.

Especially for a storyboarding position, they want to see how YOU process storyboarding and visual narrative. Not Rebecca Sugar, not Genndy Tartakovsky:  you.  There’s a developmental stage in art where artists learn by copying, and en mass the fastest, cleanest way to make sure that they’re seeing portfolios that are past that stage is to say “No Fan Art”.

Now, all this is not to say that there is anything wrong with fan art. Many many AMAZING artists make fan art that is original, fresh, and waaaaaay past the copying stage of learning.  So MUCH of art history is made up of celebrations of other established works. Cartoon Network knows this. My guess this is primarily a coping strategy for the immense undertaking of filling a position (ask anyone in HR…the hiring (or admissions) process is a crazy long, crazy time-consuming, crazy expensive thing for a company to do).

My recommendation is this: if this is something that you really, REALLY really want, and want to go for, put together a portfolio specifically for it. They want to see your drawing skills, how you think about shape, and how you process motion and narrative with sequential still images.    They give you tips right in the application!  https://www.cartoonnetworkstudios.com/cnsacademy/open/faq 

Submissions just opened on the 17th (it’s the 20th of September at the time of this posting.). You have until October 14 to show them you can bring it and deserve a spot: you can do this!  And then you also automagically have an awesome thing to talk about in your required essay!  Also consider applying next year, if this feels like too short a time to reach the goal (and there would be no shame in that).

You’ve got this!

-Agent Critique