I recently gave a short talk on Photoshop Custom Brushes here at EA Mythic (I might post about that another time). I started off talking about stylization and ended up rambling for quite a while. I think the subject is big enough to deserve a post.

What I’m going to say here has been said before by many others and probably said much better. But, this version is focused squarely on how stylization relates to games. What I’m interested in is how to make a game more attractive and make it cheaper to produce with a single style.

EDIT (2011): Re-reading this four years later, I don’t hold the same opinion anymore. Somewhere along the line during this generation of consoles, artists began placing equal weight on the value of environment art, and it shows. Game worlds in this generation have been beautiful, believable and immersive.

It’s the most common division of labor amongst game artists today. In my experience, there is a distinct skill imbalance in favor of character artists.  They’re what students and hobbyists almost always are, and so the best artists get to choose to keep working on characters. The best of the rest get to do something else, most often environment art.