The Anonymous Society of Artists, The Group of Seven, the Small Fry Media Art Team, all are collectives who have left their mark on the art world. My name is Brett Campbell and I’m the lead of the Small Fry Media art team. I knew undertaking the role of art lead would be a lot of extra work, but it’s not work if you love what you do!

Every artist has one quote or mantra that helps them maneuver through the occasionally challenging process of creating art. I remember, a couple of years ago, hearing an artist explain that art is about problem-solving (I wish I had the source). Through the artistic process, you’ll face a ton of problems, and what helps you grow as an artist is how you find creative solutions. I find that the best solutions to these problems are always the simplest, but the most difficult to come to. Often, when we’re drawing or painting, the areas of the image that seem the most difficult to execute are the areas we’re inclined to focus more detail and energy into. We tend to overanalyze and overcomplicate issues when it’s best to first try what’s simplest, because, oftentimes, that’s what’s best.

Concerning my role as the art lead, I intended to tackle my problems in the same way, trying to take the path of least resistance and working with everyone’s strengths, assigning them deliverables that aligned with what they enjoy doing and that wouldn’t seem like a huge undertaking that could potentially plummet their confidence.

Thankfully, we were blessed with an amazing art team that rival Van Gogh in their ability to produce great pieces while being stuck in a cold, white, windowless environment. Though our team is small (with only five people including myself), our areas of expertise vary in a way that conveniently hits all the boxes. We have Justin who focuses on colouring the tarot cards and doing character art. He has an amazing ability to add personality to everything he creates. Bennett focuses on animating the existing assets which adds even more life into them. Khalid, who focused on graphic design first semester and transitioned to the design team the second semester. Hayley, who is also the lead of marketing, works on the more design-oriented assets as well as concept sketches for the cards.

However, as everyone on our team had very different areas of strength, one of the issues I faced was keeping the style consistent across all the different assets. Finding a suitable duty for every member only works so long as the workload stays even across each person. Unfortunately, work needed to be spread across to different members, and so we had to problem-solve. Finding a more unified franken-style, which amalgamated all of our art styles, was what worked best to resolve this issue. And now our game has a style that has a little bit of all of us in it.

We’re all excited to show off what we’ve done–we hope you’ll check out our game The Hierophant at Level Up on April 15th!

If you’re curious to see what the art team has done, our Instagram is updated regularly with a ton of artwork from The Hierophant.

Brett