Concept Art SA (www.conceptartsa.co.za)
Hey everybody,
We've started a free community site for any and all people interested in Concept Art for films, games and more. We're literally only a few days old!
We have grand aspirations to collaborate with the game development guys across SA, and hopefully build solid foundations for the conceptual art industry in SA. Growing the industry is primarily what we are about, and we're hoping to hold events and workshops that will inform and educate people about concept art. We want to raise the level of art in SA too if we can, by collaboration and cooperative learning.
Anyways, we wanted to let you know of our existence, and I'm certain some of our (very few at the moment) members would be happy to whip up some sketches and concepts for your in-production titles!
Looking forward to meeting you guys, and if you have any questions or cool ideas or suggestions, do let us know!
You can reach us at contact@conceptartsa.com and visit the site at http://conceptartsa.com or http://conceptartsa.co.za.
We'll be sure to send our more game development orientated members your way too!
Thanks!
Ark
We've started a free community site for any and all people interested in Concept Art for films, games and more. We're literally only a few days old!
We have grand aspirations to collaborate with the game development guys across SA, and hopefully build solid foundations for the conceptual art industry in SA. Growing the industry is primarily what we are about, and we're hoping to hold events and workshops that will inform and educate people about concept art. We want to raise the level of art in SA too if we can, by collaboration and cooperative learning.
Anyways, we wanted to let you know of our existence, and I'm certain some of our (very few at the moment) members would be happy to whip up some sketches and concepts for your in-production titles!
Looking forward to meeting you guys, and if you have any questions or cool ideas or suggestions, do let us know!
You can reach us at contact@conceptartsa.com and visit the site at http://conceptartsa.com or http://conceptartsa.co.za.
We'll be sure to send our more game development orientated members your way too!
Thanks!
Ark
Comments
Just sent our artist (for makerseden.screwylightbulb.com) over to have a look, and followed you on Twitter :)
ArtSketch existed at some point, and appears to have deleted all of the posts on their forum. If it's being run by the same people, what's to say any contributions I make at CASA won't disappear into the ether too?
At least, with SAGD becoming MGSA, I knew the people who ran it, knew their motivations, and knew I wasn't wasting my time. I'm so happy I joined SAGD relatively late, because I made some damn fine posts there that I'll never be able to link again. :<
[edit] Btw, ca.o was started by a bunch of guys who tried to create a monopoly on the business. Their concept art company would censor all words on the community forum that mentioned any of their competitors, and they'd ban people who spoke up about it. Crimson Daggers pretty much started from people not liking the politics there, not appreciating the way Manley and Co were monetizing the community, and wanting a true "community" forum. So it had a raison d'etre too.
I find that online communities tend to have 'flavours' attached to them. Some people read RPS because they like the writers' styles and other people prefer Kotaku. Some people post their pictures to Flickr because they prefer the community there and others prefer Deviant Art - some people post across a bunch of sites because they know they'll get different responses at each place. If CASA develops its own uniquely flavored community while it's growing then that's what it will have going for it; being a choice that someone can make that might be more appealing than other places they've visited or just might increase the number of eyeballs to look at submitted work.
I should know, I started Game.Dev by accident because I was pissed off with SAGD and how nobody there was actually making anything. Game.Dev grew because I put work into it, I also recognised when to shut it down so that we could start MGSA properly.
CASA is an ego thing designed to serve its creators, there's nothing wrong with Legion Ink and Crimson Daggers other than "we're not in charge". I'm tired of shit like that.
But if people didn't give 'duplicate' communities a chance, I wouldn't currently own a community of awesome gamers that has become my internet happy place - the place I go to to see people of all ages interacting maturely, respectfully and with so much enthusiasm for just being NICE and helping each other that it's a shining beacon in quagmire of trolls. I moved our Minecraft servers to IndieSquish because we had a 'business disagreement' with the site we started out at. They were bringing the site's name under the umbrella of their company and would be treating the site as a business and putting business before community. I wanted the focus to stay on community so I left and Jaco and I made IndieSquish. There are shitloads of Minecraft communities out there and shitloads of indie/gaming communities. But 11.5k people still decided to try ours and we get hundreds of new members every month. We don't do anything special. We're just nice people.
Elyaradine mentioned ArtSketch - it looks like CASA was started by some (if not all) of the Art Sketch people;
"we're just a tiny group of people made up from some ArtSketch.org team members and some volunteer staff from DAS: School of Art and Design"
So yeah, maybe it will fade into nothingness like ArtSketch. I don't know why ArtSketch didn't work out, I don't know why CASA think they can promote a sustainable userbase when there are already several strong concept art communities out there. I didn't either when I started IndieSquish but we grew and I'm glad I did it. I don't like dismissing things on the fly like that. Yes, I may be naive and I don't doubt I'm irritatingly accepting/positive/encouraging/optimistic about things other people don't care about. I don't ABSOLUTELY know beyond a doubt what CASA's motives are so can't say if they're doing it out of ego, but if they're happy and the members are happy and people are enjoying the place, then so what if they are? It may not be the most honourable of motives but if people like the place, they can have at it.
1. SA does did not have even one dedicated conceptual art website that was focused on local artists. If it did, we wouldn't have started CASA.
2. LegionInk is a great community, but at CASA we are just focused on Concept Art and Illustration. Legionink covers: Art in General, I assume concept art, Cosplay, Video/Music Production (from what I can tell), Photography, creative projects, creative writing etc. etc. They run the RAGE artist alley, as well as the Cosplay competition. They are great, but also very generalist.
3. CASA is about growing the concept art community in SA - the site is non-commercial and not-for-profit. It's run by artists, for artists. On top of that, we pay for everything ourselves, and we don't run ads - because we want a clean, productive, growth focused community.
We are not interested in the local politics that sees so many sites fall, we are about art. We will always be about art, and we will never, ever stop being about art. As long as we can sustain the existence of the site, it will exist. Having no profit motive means we can innovate without compromising on quality for the members.
It's for local concept artists. Period. Mods are just there to make sure we are socially responsible (no porn, or offensive content) and to keep people on track (so we don't end up covering non-relevant fields of interest (making movies etc.)
We're for the concept artists, and it's their community. That is all.
1. If a forum/organisation has enough value to offer (ie people who put their time and effort into making content, managing the site, and offering/implementing experience and insights into the right subject matters), then people will go there anyway, no matter criticisms.
2. If it doesn't, it just falls away. I've seen a few of those. So as cliches go, time will tell.
I am curious about Concept artists in SA. I've only had exposure to a few, so I will wonder out loud as to what the forum can offer to concept artists. Are there industry connections leading to hiring possibilities? Job postings? Content from experienced concept artists? What can they do there that they can't elsewhere?
Industry connections? Definitely - we (the people who run CASA) have relationships with many industry professionals of varying degrees. Initially we had listed such people in this response, but it would be unprofessional of us to name them here, as we are well connected, and would have to get permission from each. For an idea of who we know and have relationships with, please do visit artsketch.org and see who we've interviewed. We know many more than that though!
As for job postings - the industry is very global. Most people that want to be concept artists know that portfolio is everything, and if they submit a fantastic portfolio to a game developer/publisher, they will get noticed - ask Feng Zhu, because it's his opinion too (take a look at www.fengzhudesign.com to see what he has worked on. Some things include Transformers (films), Unreal series (games), and many other fantastic titles). Local work is naturally sparse, because all the major developers are oversees. Does it mean we shouldn't have a community here? Not at all. With a local community, we can create the art that will fuel the visualization in the games that future SA game makers will create. We have to start somewhere.
As for concept art from experienced concept artists - it's coming, we've only been up 4 days! But yes, it is coming, though we don't immediately want to let cats out of the bag. As we said above, we are very well connected to some really fantastic artists.
As for what they can do at CASA that they can't do elsewhere - we're the only dedicated conceptual art community in SA as of now. As an example, would game developers want to receive critique from non-gamers who are interested in cooking or woodwork? Or would receiving critique from people who love games be preferred? It's the same with concept art - we don't want to dilute conceptual art to some kind of generalist thing - it's a specialist, highly complex, amazingly creative industry, and we want a place for local focus. No place previously existed. Simple as that.
Finally, we love concept art. We really do. We want SA to be one of the top countries for it.
Because prior reputation is important: I have heard of DAS multiple times and it's not something that inspires me to suggest that school to potential students. I also find that the examples of why this forum is useful offered above are pretty weak. I kinda feel that SA has a history of people who are better at marketing and sounding swish conning interested youngsters into participating in things that end up isolating them from a larger community of like-minded individuals. I think that we should try to point out that issue as much as possible whenever we can and see how the people advocating for more isolation (because really, there isn't an insurmountable gap between digital artists and conceptual artists) respond to these questions.
After all, the right response only creates more useful content :)
I mean, so far @Arkaedun has given a convincing argument for joining Feng Zhu's forums ;) I'm also curious as to why there are so many empty forum categories on CASA's site. That type of hyper-isolationism didn't work for SAGD, I wonder what makes them think it will work well for their non-general community?
P.S. I'm not even getting into the difference between defining a community around exclusionary instead of inclusionary principles...
SAGD did the same thing: The thing people liked the most there was talking about how cool your next project's code was going to be and congratulating each other before anything was ever made (followed closely by commiserating on how unfair it was that epic project X didn't see the light of day due to the failings of everyone else but you). I should hope that the success behaviors of MGSA are self-evident.
Right now the content is on the low side, and saying "it's coming" doesn't convince me of anything. And if by "it's coming" they mean "if you join, you can generate content for us YAY and you can ALL generate content for ALL of us YAY!" then, er, good luck.
We - all of us here at MGSA - knows that our community has taken a lot of pains from the organisers and originator's side to get started. And that the organisers and originators simply *are* examples in their field (Desktop Dungeons and Broforce are very much real examples of real work getting really done) are, I'm sure, part of factors leading to this community's growth.
So again, I only care about people walking their talk. If there's value, it'll show.
Yeah, MGSA is wonderful. *hugs MGSA*