Welcome back to Troop Spotlight, the blog series where we discuss various Troops from OgreWare’s Calling All Heroes!
This week’s Troop is both my favorite and my least favorite. Not for any actual elemental reason – I’ve nothing against the element of Fire – no, my reason for disliking it is my own work: the lineart I created for the illustration. I was extremely tired and dreading a deadline, and I sort of just scribbled until I had it done. I wasn’t pleased with my work at all.
But when OgreWare sent it over to me to make this blog post, I was amazed and actually wondered, momentarily, whether this was really the one I was thinking of. Could my least favorite lineart out of all the ones I’d done for this project, have somehow become the final illustration I liked best?
See, this is one of the (many) reasons I believe that collaboration is essential for artistic types, as much as it goes against our solitary, lone-wolf, independently thinking temperaments: Rarely does everyone struggle with the same aspect of the project. I know that OgreWare had a heck of a time with the Faerie illustration, but I loved doing that one. Conversely, I really struggled to illustrate my portion of the Fire Elemental, but OgreWare had no difficulty making it look great.
No artist is an island, and when we form a unit to create together, we end up sort of covering each other’s mistakes, and making up for each other’s weaknesses. As I joke of my partner and myself, “The rocks in his head match the holes in mine.” This is just one reason that I enjoy working together with other artists, and I hope I’ll get to talk about others as we go along.
Collaboration is not just an option. It’s not just a style of working. It is essential for just about any artist looking to create anything really, really great. Two minds are better than one, even when those minds are artistic. Maybe especially then.
If you’d like to play Calling All Heroes and recruit the Fire Elemental yourself, you can click here to play in your browser, or click here to download the Android .apk file. And check back next week for the next Troop!
-Admin Taylor