How to get a job as a technical artist

If you ask multiple technical artists what they do, the chances are you'll get very different responses. Although there are generalists, it is more often an umbrella that encompasses a number of specialist disciplines such as environment, shaders, VFX, and pipeline, to name just a few, so you could be involved more with the front-end or the back-end. Naturally, this also varies hugely from studio to studio. However, if we're to explain the essence of the role, then Jodie Azhar, technical art director at Silver Rain Games says: "Technical artists are problem solvers." "Quite often they will be creating tools to solve these problems, for instance creating a procedural system to save time for an environment artist from doing very repetitive tasks. It also involves being the bridge between the art and programming sides of game development. "They can act like translators between artists and programmers," she adds. "They need to understand artists' processes and how they want something to ...