Freelance creature illustrator needed for 2D dark fantasy indie game

Become a major contributor to the next hit creature deckbuilding PC game, like Slay the Spire and Monster Train! Your artwork will be front-and-center on our official Steam page and throughout our game. When gamers think about our game, your artwork will be what they see!

What we need

A fully-remote 2D game illustrator to create 7x hand-drawn creature illustrations with a medium level of detail. We will be rigging and adding Spine/skeletal animations to these illustrations, so they need to use Photoshop layers which enable that (eg. torso, front arm, back leg) (not concept art).
See our mini vision board for a bit of detail on the design elements we're looking for.

Theme: Fantasy medieval mixed with post-apocalyptic dark fantasy and necromancy.
Mood/tone: The biomes are hopeless, brooding, demonic, evil, corrupted, and insurmountable. But the player character is brave, confident, and capable - a last beacon of hope for humanity.

Use of generative AI to create any part of this artwork is not allowed.

Depending on the fan response to this artwork, we intend to offer additional freelance positions that are multiple times larger than this one, and we're very interested in working with the same artists again!

How much are we payin'?

We're offering 1,750 - 2,100 CAD total (roughly 1,250 - 1,500 USD), depending on your amount of relevant work experience.

A bit about us

We're a small friendly indie game company with 2 cofounders: A 10-year Google software engineering lead, and a global top 0.1% chess player. We're both big gamers, and are excited to bring some new never-before-seen mechanics and experiences to the roguelike deckbuilding genre!
We're working with a few artists for different types of art in the game - We do the programming / game design / backstory, but we need your artistic skills to bring it to life!

To get the art for the game right, it's important to have attention to detail. To show us your attention to detail, please include “Let's make the next hit deckbuilder!” and your name in the subject line of your application. That helps us tell great artists like you apart from folks who are spamming applications :)

Job requirements

• Experience creating layered creature illustrations for use with Spine/skeletal animations, ideally with a similar theme to our game
  • Experience doing the rigging / creating the animations is NOT required, but the illustrations need to be riggable (not concept art)
• Experience creating artwork in a style similar to what's shown in our mini vision board
• Expert at using Photoshop to create illustrations (we need all artwork in Photoshop's .psd or .psb formats)
• Creates artwork with their human skill; not AI
• Some experience with following a style guide (eg. color palettes, line thickness) in order to maintain consistency with other artists working on this game. Providing feedback to improve our style guide is encouraged
• Strong written and verbal English communication skills
• You must have the availability to complete at least 2 stages of development per week. A “stage of development” is a new or revised sketch, linework, or rendering/final version

How to apply

We don't give you any runaround with recruiters or AI filters - your application goes straight to the guy making the offer! No resume needed. Please send an email to [email protected], with links to relevant work in your portfolio, a short description of why this is a good fit for you, and where you found out about this position. Please do not use AI to write your application - we want to hear from the real you! Extra effort and personal touches will go a long way to make you stand out.

We can't wait to meet you!!!