I'm a programmer working on a game. I have been paying for art (work for hire) for the better part of a year now and am making good progress. My art has come from several sources and up until now I have been guiding artists submitting work to help them match my desired art style.

At this point though I'm finding it necessary for some sort of formalized style guide for my game. With 3 characters created and backgrounds, HUD elements, icons and weapon / armor on the way I need to make sure they all look like they belong in the same game.

Now to the question:

When telling an artist what style I want (in terms of art style, e.g. cell shading, pixel art, etc) I don't know how to determine the art style of the characters I have had drawn. And the artists I talk to seem to call the same thing something different. Is there a place I can go to read up on the different art styles (with examples) that I can include in my style guide? This would help me be able to consistently point to a particular style and even potentially link to a source that explains to the artist what that style means, getting us on the same page essentially..

Barring, or in addition to that. What art style would this be?

Hmm, that looks like a cell-shaded 2D version of the art from FF9, what were they calling that style in articles about the game...? I could make up some crap like "fantasy caricature" or "SD cartoon", but I haven't seen a style like that with a label on it before, as far as I can recall.

But, really words are inaccurate as style guides, you instead or additionally want to harvest a color palette from your existing art and give that and some example pieces like this to an artist to be their style guide.

Hmm, that looks like a cell-shaded 2D version of the art from FF9, what were they calling that style in articles about the game...? I could make up some crap like "fantasy caricature" or "SD cartoon", but I haven't seen a style like that with a label on it before, as far as I can recall.

But, really words are inaccurate as style guides, you instead or additionally want to harvest a color palette from your existing art and give that and some example pieces like this to an artist to be their style guide.

I have been posting this image as sample work for anyone contributing but I still get submissions with wildly different styles. How does one harvest a color palette? Do I just get each individual color in this image and post those as available colors to use? What if an asset requires the color orange since that's not represented in this image?

Thanks for your help

Well, yeah, you can't use just one image. Would you learn how to do, say, a cartwheel from only seeing it done once? Give them half a dozen/all available images to use to triangulate. You could mail them a zip file or just give them access to your online repository for art assets created so far, if you have such a thing.

To harvest a color palette: load all relevant images into photoshop, gimp, or similar. Use the eyedropper tool to capture each distinct color. In a new image, make a square of each captured color. If possible, physically group together colors which occur together like the skin tone and it's two levels of shadow in the image above. You should have somewhere between 50 and 300 squares when done. Give this color palette to the artist.

I thinkt that you can't pin it down to a description of your art style, every artist will most probably have an other understanding of what you want to tell them. Best to pick up certain features of your artstyle like
- shading (cel shading)
- level of details (low details)
- color selection (color paletts)
- proportion (exaggeration of head)
- shape (round shapes)
etc.
and use 2-3 images for each feature to display your vision.

Combine this into 1-2 large images with text as art guideline reference.