How to Be an Artist on Our Team
What You Get
J&B Publishing is always on the lookout for talented artists. We accept a variety of mediums—everything from comics-style pencil-on-paper to illustrated calligraphy to silk screens—and prefer to work with artists long-term.
We pay artists a pre-negotiated, per-piece fee up front. Artists sell us the copyrights to these works, though we are happy if artists use said works to promote themselves, J&B Publishing or any of J&B Publishing’s fictional universes. In other words, we’re pretty flexible about usage rights, just ask first.
Further, with the exception of the “Stories From the Lost and Found” universe, J&B Publishing prefers to keep one artist per fictional universe. For example, Anh Vu has done all the illustrations for the Enclave Universe and Ma Seong-hoon has done all the illustrations in the Old Heroes Universe. We do this because we want to establish continuity and consistency across the different works in each universe, along with a preference that artists gain an intimate familiarity with the fictional worlds they illustrate. What this means for you is that, once you sign on to a universe, you will almost certainly continue getting commissions as your universe expands.
What You Give Us
J&B Publishing needs to establish a close working relationship between artists and authors. As such, our artists are expected to offer clear, open communication with writers, ensuring that the emotional, canonical and symbolic content of each artwork matches the content of the story.
As an example of how this works, the work order for the first Enclave Universe story, Imp of the Old Enclave, included detailed photos of the fictional village’s plant life, architectural style and a hand-drawn map of the locale. The writer and artist also collaborated to establish the most important thematic, symbolic and emotional elements to be stressed in the illustrations, the detailed physical descriptions of characters as they appear in the book and the personality quirks to be expressed. This feedback and development between artist and author can be a two-way street, and often is!
For the Enclave and Old Heroes universes, artists are usually responsible for three or four black and white interior illustrations and one color illustration for the cover. In the Stories From the Lost and Found universe, artists are usually only responsible for one illustration within the book. This can be color or black and white, as determined by the author and the individual artist. Stories From the Lost and Found often include 15 or more artists and, consequently, are the easiest to break into. The artist is NOT responsible for the graphic design of the cover in any universe – we handle that separately.
What We’re Looking For
The two best things a prospective artist can do to work with J&B Publishing are demonstrate both a high-quality portfolio of finished works and an ability to meet deadlines. In addition, the ability to productively collaborate with authors is imperative.
Artists interested in working with us should pick a fictional universe they’d like to focus on and contact us directly at https://jandbpublish.com/contact/.