Yeah, I gotta say it is totally lame that I dropped the ball and didn’t get this edited the day I saw it. The CS banner wasn’t something the Creative Department handled - I’m not saying this makes sense, but we had a banner maker on staff that wasn’t an artist, and at some point it stopped getting made and I wasn’t aware of it because it just wasn’t on my radar. When I saw the board I did assign the artwork, and to keep the fire lit under the CD’s ass I left the current banner up, because I felt like 1 more week wouldn’t hurt when a lovely replacement was going to happen at the end of it. Unfortunately, life didn’t turn out that way and 1 week became a month and I had to reassign the artwork and make the edit myself. That’s the unfortunate truth of it, and in future I’ll make the few-minute edits and not keep the fire lit.

As to artists covering for each other, we’ll reassign and switch assignments if needed on pretty much anything that isn’t pets or SBQ lines. SBQ lines have been explained already, but here’s a little more info on how pets work, and why they work that way.

Way back in the day (years ago, now) each artist could draw any pet they wanted, and we had some huge problems with consistency. Bigger than anything we have now. As much as I’d love to have the budget and workforce that Disney or any big studio has to have each artist learn how to draw each pet in the event that it becomes an absolute emergency that a certain pet is drawn that month, we just don’t, and so the most efficient way for us to ensure the greatest consistency is to keep artists assigned to a pet, and only they draw that pet, which they have been assigned to after the pet trials that mentioned. There are often very different skill sets involved in each pet, and we have artists that are good at different things, so we assign pets on that basis to get the best quality we can get. Pets really always have been a quality over quantity thing, but we’ve still made it a huge priority to get several pets out per month. (I know it’s always been a priority of mine, pets have always been my favourite to the point that I have very little of them left to draw and therefore can offer less to the release schedule!)

Every pet species does now have an artist assigned to it. The idea of character sheets for each pet would be wonderful, but you are correct in them being labour intensive! They have been tried in the past and at the rate they’re able to be drawn around the other day-to-day responsibilities of each artist, we’d end up with outdated character sheets before we got anywhere near finishing them. I’m not sure I agree that the trial sketches from pet applications could be used as a character sheet - they’re usually very rough and haven’t had the benefit of being with an artist that’s had the chance to really get into the character yet. (I look at my own application images and my images just months later, and there's a much greater sense of comfort in the drawing of the pet after having spent some months with it) It would be better to look at the existing pets to get the character down. At this point, each pet has enough past poses to look through to constitute enough of a character turnaround. We actually do have some skeleton mockups/turnarounds in our resources database from the more recent pets. I know that with the neela I did a huge pose sheet for them in case anything happened to me! The xotl too, actually. I’d love to embark on a project like this for all pets, but realistically I know that it’s not the most practical use of our time. BUT, with the newer pets and going forward, it has been something I’ve been working on.

I’m learning, guys. And I still care about and love working for this site, or I wouldn’t be here.