{"id":39551,"date":"2025-11-27T02:21:28","date_gmt":"2025-11-27T02:21:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/usa\/how-one-artist-landed-a-6-month-dream-gig-making-art-for-liam-obriens-critical-role-fantasy-book\/"},"modified":"2025-11-27T02:21:28","modified_gmt":"2025-11-27T02:21:28","slug":"how-one-artist-landed-a-6-month-dream-gig-making-art-for-liam-obriens-critical-role-fantasy-book","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/usa\/how-one-artist-landed-a-6-month-dream-gig-making-art-for-liam-obriens-critical-role-fantasy-book\/","title":{"rendered":"How one artist landed a 6-month dream gig making art for Liam O&#8217;Brien&#8217;s Critical Role fantasy book"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i.insider.com\/6925711fabd5e944effb6c3a?format=jpeg\" alt=\"A composite image of Liam O&#039;Brien and a page from &quot;Der Katzenprinz,&quot; his fantasy children&#039;s book.\"\/><figcaption>Liam O&#039;Brien worked on &quot;Der Katzenprinz,&quot; his first book, with artist Charlie Borovsky.<\/p>\n<p>Critical Role; Insight Editions<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<ul>\n<li>Critical Role cofounder Liam O&#039;Brien released &quot;Der Katzenprinz,&quot; his first children&#039;s book, in April.<\/li>\n<li>The book comes with 112 fully illustrated pages by artist Charlie Borovsky.<\/li>\n<li>Borovsky, who spent six months working on the book, explained how he landed his dream gig.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Like most creatives who wind up working for Critical Role, Charlie Borovsky was a fan first.<\/p>\n<p>Borovsky, who&#039;s based in Prague, said he started watching Critical Role&#039;s &quot;Dungeons and Dragons&quot; campaign on Twitch, a stream that remains a mainstay of the crew&#039;s nerdworld business.<\/p>\n<p>Ten years on, as Critical Role sells out stadiums for its live shows and makes Amazon-backed animated series about the stream he watched at home, Borovsky has found himself contributing to it. He is the artist for Critical Role cofounder Liam O&#039;Brien&#039;s &quot;Der Katzenprinz,&quot; a 112-page children&#039;s book.<\/p>\n<p>O&#039;Brien, Borovsky said, had been aware of his work and portfolio from when he began posting fan art of the former&#039;s wizard character, Caleb Widogast, in 2018. But it took more than five years before O&#039;Brien approached Borovsky and asked if he&#039;d like to do the art for &quot;Der Katzenprinz.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>&quot;In autumn 2023, we started talking in emails, and it wasn&#039;t until the winter of 2024 that we started the project,&quot; Borovsky said.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;He approached me about it and asked if I wanted to hop on, and I was like, &#039;Hell yeah, this sounds really up my alley,&#039;&quot; Borovsky added.<\/p>\n<p>Then came a six-month crunch time for Borovsky, where &quot;Der Katzenprinz&quot; was the only art project he worked on. Borovsky also makes art for other tabletop role-playing projects and has been a freelance creative for books and games alike.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;It was like, my life. I wasn&#039;t doing anything else,&quot; Borovsky said. &quot;I&#039;m also chronically ill, so if I have a job, I have to just do that, and I won&#039;t have enough hours in the day to do anything else.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>Working with O&#039;Brien was smooth, Borovsky said, and they moved quickly from thumbnails to line art, then finished artwork.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;Honestly, Liam was really nice and easy. I only had a few notes from him, and most of them were just like, &#039;This looks great, keep on going,&#039;&quot; Borovsky said.<\/p>\n<p>Borovsky said that the early concept work was his favorite part of the process, because he got a lot of creative freedom when conceptualizing how the work would look on the page, in concert with O&#039;Brien&#039;s writing.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;It usually gets harder toward the end of the project, where you just have to do the manual work of actually rendering and shading everything,&quot; Borovsky said.<\/p>\n<p>The most rewarding part of the project, Borovsky said, was seeing O&#039;Brien promote the book upon its release.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;That made it so worth it. It really warmed my heart after some of the stress of the deadlines, actually seeing him talk about it and genuinely seeming like he&#039;s really proud of the project,&quot; Borovsky said.<\/p>\n<h2>How to get a nerdworld dream job<\/h2>\n<figure><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i.insider.com\/69256ed1abd5e944effb6c37?format=jpeg\" alt=\"A page from &quot;Der Katzenprinz,&quot; art by Charlie Borovsky.\"\/><figcaption>&quot;Der Katzenprinz&quot; is a story written by Liam O&#039;Brien. Charlie Borovsky did full illustrations for the tale.<\/p>\n<p>Insight Editions<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>Borovsky told Business Insider his tips could help artists, whether they hope to get a gig with Critical Role or other businesses.<\/p>\n<p>First, Borovsky says, it&#039;s essential to define your personal style as an artist. That means getting better at the fundamentals of art so companies will be convinced that you can deliver what they&#039;re asking for.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;I wouldn&#039;t say to focus on having an art style that will be so different from everybody else that everybody will remember you,&quot; Borovsky said. &quot;That&#039;s really not the point. You need to have a style that will be good for all the different publishers, but still unique enough that people can recognize that it&#039;s yours.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>Secondly, Borovsky says that there&#039;s a demand for artists who not only draw characters but also have some versatility.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;Not only focusing on characters, but doing all the other things, creatures, magic items, environments, that&#039;s what you get work through, usually,&quot; Borovsky said.<\/p>\n<p>Borovsky added that it&#039;s important to curate your online portfolio with a diverse array of items that you can draw.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;I definitely say you need to participate in the online things of portfolio day, and just following art directors online,&quot; Borovsky said.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;Sometimes, art directors post online, saying, &#039;We&#039;re looking for an artist,&#039; and you can drop your portfolio link under the post,&quot; Borovsky said.<\/p>\n<p>If you&#039;re hoping to work for Critical Role, Borovsky suggests making more fan art to get noticed by the company&#039;s creative team \u2014 and to keep honing your skills.<\/p>\n<p><strong>&quot;<\/strong>Critical Role is really good at picking artists from their fan art circles, instead of outsourcing it to somebody totally new,&quot; Borovsky said.<\/p>\n<p>Read the original article on Business Insider<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Liam O&#039;Brien worked on &quot;Der Katzenprinz,&quot; his first book, with artist Charlie Borovsky. Critical Role; Insight Editions Critical Role cofounder Liam O&#039;Brien released &quot;Der Katzenprinz,&quot; his first children&#039;s book, in April. The book comes with 112 fully illustrated pages by artist Charlie Borovsky. Borovsky, who spent six months working on the book, explained how he [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":39552,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-39551","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-usa"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39551","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39551"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39551\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/39552"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39551"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39551"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39551"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}