Mechanics in Motion

If you have ever tried to offer feedback to artist on their work and things went badly, you probably ended up wondering, “is the artist oversensitive, or am I just a jerk?” Perhaps the problem was largely one of language. It’s pretty well understood that most artists are probably going to be lost in a swirling mass of programming terms when trying to talk to a coder, but have you ever considered that art has its own vocabulary? Terms like value, hue, warm, cool and saturation all target very specific features of a piece of art. People not familiar with these specific art terms are going to throw around all sorts of words that are ambiguous, or even worse, actually imply an art definition which is not what they mean at all. As my goal here is to try and offer some workarounds for those untrained in the arts, my solution is not simply for you to go out and start reading art lexicons. You will pick the language eventually, but meanwhile, there are some very important things you can be aware of that will help this process that artists call a critique.

A critique is an informal sort of meeting where you look at an artist’s work and evaluate what is both good about the work, where it is successful, where it needs improvement, and most importantly where it should be altered to meet the standards of the project.  To the artist, it’s perhaps a bit more; it is the time when he bares his or her soul to the world so that it can be ripped into tiny pieces. That may sound melodramatic, but the truth is that a good artist puts a bit of his soul into every piece of work, and a critique can often feel just a bit like that dream people have where they forgot to put their clothes on before going out in public. An artist with experience knows this, and isn’t going to fall apart just because you don’t like something they did.  In fact, what they are after is an honest evaluation of what needs to be improved. Note, though, I said experienced— some artists simply are not used to this process, and can react defensively. This type of attitude makes it hard for to work, because everyone walks on on eggshells when critiquing because they don’t want to offend the artist, and nothing really gets accomplished. (For insight into what it’s like to go through a critique, or to help you survive one if you are an artist, read: http://www.wikihow.com/Survive-an-Art-School-Critique.)

There is a formal process for the critiquing of art; this method is used by critics and art students to write and evaluate art in an academic sense, but the method is worth noting for evaluating artwork for your project. There are four steps in this process: describe, analyze, interpret and judge. This method is most related to studying the fine arts, but it can offer insight into how to judge art for your game.

First begin by describing the piece to yourself. You might not literally say much at this stage (you aren’t writing a review of a gallery show here) but you should be looking— really looking. Look at the colors, shapes, edges and lines, and the mood. Study those things for a bit. You won’t be making judgments yet, so think in terms of perceiving only.

Once you have thoroughly given the piece a good look, you can begin to analyze. Still here you are not judging, just analyzing. If you do comment at all, you might verbalize some of your thoughts in a neutral or positive way, “the blue is quite intense”, for example. Whatever you say, avoid “I like…” or “I don’t like” at this stage. Be careful and don’t turn this into a passive aggressive way of judging though; it should be genuine analysis.

Next try and interpret the piece. In practical terms this mainly means trying to understand what the artist was thinking, and why they made the decisions they made. A piece of artwork is the culmination of a series of artistic choices, and understanding these choices will be much more valuable to you and the artist in working together.

Eventually, it’s going to be time to make some judgments. I suggest that a critique should always begin with something positive about the piece. It doesn’t matter how bad it is.  You have to validate all the work that went into it, and remember that the piece you develop an opinion about in a few short seconds probably took hours or even days to make. Look at the piece and determine something about it that fits what you were trying to go for and that aligns with your project.  This validates that you are actually paying attention to the work, and describing it. This is not just being sensitive— it’s being practical, because you are telling the artists what you want to see more of.

When judging concept art I have found that it’s pointless to talk about a piece if it doesn’t support a specific purpose.  “I like it,” is nice (and no artist will mind hearing it) but it’s actually a useless comment.  What do you like? Why do you like it? Talk about specific colors or objects in the piece.  Even if it’s a website, talk about specific sections and graphical elements. Admit your absolute ignorance of the subject and prompt the artist to help you be more specific.  “That header thing up there, what do you call that?  I like that part.” Hopefully then this begins a dialogue. The artist can ask specific questions, because he or she needs to specifically determine what you do and do not like. Of course, telling the artist what you like is also important so they won’t go change it. The last thing you need is the artist going back and changing the one part you do like.

Of course at times you are going to find things about an artist’s work that you want changed. This is where things get tougher.  Being very specific is crucial here.  Something I have seen happen all too often is a frustrating process that starts with a negative comment; the artist starts to ask some questions to try and determine what exactly the problem is, so they can translate it into “art language”. The person critiquing perceives this as sensitivity and starts walking on eggshells and making apologies, or trying to rephrase their criticism in friendlier ways and soon the artist is not only confused, but now he feels he isn’t even being respected as a professional. Meanwhile the criticizer thinks the artist is just getting more and more defensive. I’ve seen this go from bad to worse and everyone ends up frustrated.

In these cases, having your art bible to go back to is invaluable.  You can refer back to specific colors, textures and mood boards and have something with which to compare the piece.  This will help you to determine what is different than that for which you were looking.  You may even find that the artist has used some of the images as his direct reference. Maybe you had a vehicle reference— an image you picked for its dark colors— and the artist nailed the look of the vehicle, but made it very bright. Now you have something specific. You can validate the vehicle and ask that it be darkened up. You might look at the color palette and find the colors way off.  Suddenly, you’re not as art ignorant as you think— even you can see when there is bright pink in a concept piece but none in the color palette. This will give you the confidence to know when the artist just isn’t getting it right, and give you something specific to talk about.

One thing to be aware of is that an artist can become very confused with “group critiques”. One person says they like on thing and another two minutes later says it needs to change. It’s best to keep the judging stage to a limited number of people, and in the end, the artist is going to have to choose one person to listen to, and this is ideally the art director.  If at all possible, try to come to a consensus with the group before spewing out a long list of contradictions. If this becomes a big problem, then consider limiting the critique to just yourself or just those people who have need to have input on a specific aspect of the concept piece. For example, the game designer needs to give approval on the accuracy on various game play elements that are functional, and the writer or content designer may have some things to say about accuracy. However, be wary of these comments becoming overly judgmental on an artistic level.

Follow up critiques can sometimes prove even more frustrating than original critiques. The artist may come back to you with changes, only for you to find they have deviated even further from what you wanted than before. In this case, its useful to go back and look at the first piece and try and find the things that you liked that have changed. This often reveals that there was not a clear communication in the first place, or that you may not have even really been aware of what you wanted. Go back through the steps and try to more clear.

Finally, remember that there are plenty of artists who are trying to hone their skills who are not yet experts, especially in the indie world. If you’re patient and work with them perhaps they will improve, especially if you encourage them. But it’s also true that you are going to find artists who are temperamental, can’t meet a deadline, or are just plain bad.  What you need to be able to do is give constructive and specific feedback with lots of visual reference. If you can do that, you have much better chance of being able to sort out the talent from those you just can’t work with.

For a more complete explanation of formal art critiquing: FourStepsinArtCriticismwebready.pdf