Where to find great comic book artists?

Note: this guide is written for Indie Comic Book creators with a smaller budget.

Okay, so you have this great comic book idea, but you're a writer, not an artist. What do you do?  Well, since Martin, our Art Director, and I are continuously out scouting for great artists for our books, we'd thought we'd offer a few tips:

deviantArt houses portfolios
of most aspiring artists.

One great resource you've probably heard about is deviantART. Deviantart is one of the world's largest online art communities and has a great comics section and sequential art group that tend to deliver gold, as long as you have the patience to dig through hundreds of sequential pages. Once we made our selection of great artists, we then went on to look at each artist's Favorites gallery - great artists usually follow other great artists.

We also make a point of following all these artists on deviantArt, Twitter, Facebook and other relevant social media accounts and try to listen for any request for work from them. Since not all artists are particularly organized (i.e. many will lose our email addresses and fail to contact us when they're available, etc.), following their social media profiles can instantly alert  us to when a great artist is looking for work.

I know, I know, who wants to follower hundreds of artists, right?  Fortunately, with today's technology you don't have to see everything they post.  For example, Tweetdeck, Twitter's desktop application, allows you to add all the artists you follow to a dedicated list, and then create a column where you only look at tweets with specific keywords that indicate the artist might be looking for work. This method works brilliantly for us - the moment that column shows a tweet, we are immediately made aware an artist has become available.

Not all networking has to be done online.  One offline tactic we use is leafing through books from small publishers, and noting which artists do superb work. Since small publishers often find it harder to keep books going, it's more likely that the artists working for them might find themselves out of a job one day. When this happens, we contact them immediately.

What To Ask A Prospective Artist

So the artist you've been following has suddenly become available.  What do you ask them?  Here's what we ask

• Page rate (how much they charge for each page and how this breaks down for pencils, pencils + inks, and pencils + inks + colors where applicable).
• Character design rates
• 1 full-length front 
• 1 full length back 
• 3 heads with expressions 
• Some sketches of objects and weapons
• Environment design rates
• Turnaround time for a 22-page book + cover (again, we need to know how this breaks down for pencils, pencils + inks, and pencils + inks + colors where applicable).
• Their current availability (if they don't have any availability in the near future, we ask them to contact us when they need work).

By getting answers to these questions we build a spreadsheet with a sheet dedicated to each artists, ordered by their skill level.

Of course, not all artists will work out: some may not be able to keep deadlines, others might start supplying sloppy art, etc. That is why we try to work with a as wide a variety of artists as possible - especially in the beginning. This allows us to not only identify who is professional and who is not, but it also allows us to grow our network, which in turn introduces us to more great artists.

In the end, finding an artist who consistently delivers high-quality work on time is pretty much like finding your hidden super power. At the very least they're worth their weight in gold.  Do whatever you can to keep a great relationship with them and try to keep them employed as best you can. We do.