A: Well, we don’t really have a good way for you to do that. Keep in mind that we only put out maybe 3-4 games per year, and we already have a handful of illustrators and designers that we know we like to work with (freelancers, primarily, though we have an in-house graphics person to help put things together), so we’re not really looking for new artists. That said, we get lots of people who just send us a form email to thelab@looneylabs.com, usually with a link to their portfolio online so we can get some sense of what their work looks like. A link to your work is very important!

Unfortunately, what happens to all of those emails is that they get dumped in a box where most never get looked at. We save them anyway, on the off-chance that we might be looking for a slightly different look one of these days, and then maybe we’ll glance through them… a surprising number have a style that is simply not compatible with the Looney Labs “feel,” but then again, most of these are clearly form-letters, and people just send them out in vast quantities without doing a lot of research on who they’re sending to. Probably as close as most came to vetting recipients was “This is a game company. I make illustrations that are good for, or have even been used in games before.”

Ways we find artists, from most common method, to least:
people we already work with
people we know
people directly recommended to us
people we’ve met
searches on the internet for images that we can connect to the artist
lastly, illustration sample books and the emails we get

For example, for Get the MacGuffin, we used the work of Alex Bradley, who is a long-time friend who is an artist, though previously he had only done video work for us. We found a new artist for the Star Trek series by looking at various fan art and comics, and finding someone whose style we liked. For another upcoming game, we have Derek Ring doing the art and design, who we’ve been working with for years and years. For Anatomy Fluxx we actually looked online for clip-art that fit the style we wanted, and then managed to contact the specific artist… who’s in eastern Europe, of all places. That’s very unusual.