Marketplace Success Story: Suzanne Helmigh

“Having come from a AAA concept art background, I know all too well how fast ideas need to be generated. To get a solid and realistic rendition, you must work with references,” she shares. Two years ago,  she started practicing HEMA (Historical European Martial Arts) and found that clashing swords with others was a great way to blow off steam and get in some exercise. The need for good references and doing such a sport as HEMA lead to asking friends in her class pose for reference. Eventually, she began sharing her private reference albums with other artists and splitting the income so they could afford to make more reference packs for the community.

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Her advice to young artists is to make sure to work on discipline and learning and repeating all the basics. Having good artistic skills is the key ingredient of receiving good job offers and that’s the fastest way, she says.

“If you have something you’re already pretty adept at, share it! Maybe even for a small fee. It can be in the form of reference packs, texture packs and  kitbash packs – heck even speedpaint video’s of your studies. “

Being Active & Responsive to the Community

She noted that since there has been a lot of interest her composition and line-art process, she’s putting together  a tutorial about that and teaching people the simplest route of telling your story the best way by the use of composition, lighting, bodylanguage, focal points,etc. She’s also currently working on a female warrior anatomy pack as well and reference packs based on lighting and facial expressions.

Engaging with the community is part of getting your work out there.  Helmigh says she saves time by linking her other social media platforms to ArtStation so that she can post to them with a custom message automatically when she uploads new artwork.

“This way you can simply keep on painting. As a tip: When adding text to your image, it’s often key to ask people a question like: What do you think? Do you think this character will survive this dragon fight? What do you think the character in the image is thinking right now? This will inspire people to comment on your work and start and interaction with you.”

“The moment I joined ArtStation felt like a new breath of air was given to the online artist community. Other social media had become saturated with self-promotion and lacked interaction. Now I always have ArtStation open in my browser to get inspired by the new works that get posted every day as well as follow my favorite artists closely on their inspiring journeys.”