Artist tags on Games with Art Teams

Something that's bugged me for some years now is that, say, all art assets from Granblue Fantasy get tagged under Minaba Hideo. He was the director of their art team in the beginning and now the CEO of their game-design company CyDesignation but the process of designing and/or doing lineart doesn't actually go to him for every character in Granblue. He can't really be credited fairly for the entire game's massive output.

Related to this, tagging official character splashes Senran Kagura New Link as Yaegashi Nan's art is just not correct, you can tell it's an emulation of his style but not actually him putting it out. In fact whenever Yaegashi does art for Senran Kagura these days it has all of his modern tells all over it whereas the New Link art is cleaned of individual quirks. A lot of gacha with iconic artists for the IP can't actually get one person to churn out that much art in so little time. Blue Reflection Sun was definitely aping Kishida Mel at times.

I'm just curious if there are some ideas for how to accurately reflect the situations here. A style tag would make sense for stuff like SK New Link and BR Sun, whereas GBF has its own house style that has evolved over the years—maybe a tag for CyDesignation is appropriate?

granblue tagging has always been a bit of a mess since basically forever. Minaba Hideo probably did contribute to a lot of the early character designs, but it would probably be hard to tell when exactly he took a step back and let the team take over. If you look through all 2300 posts under Minaba Hideo, only 16 of them are not granblue official art, and this has been the case ever since the creation of his artist tag. I would propose to just remove his name from all granblue official arts entirely but leave it blank just like how official arts for most other gacha games are treated when there is artist to directly credit.

Bumping this because I recently uploaded some Senran Kagura New Link and Blue Reflection Sun game CGs and am now having doubts about the artists due to the explanations given in the posts above. I don’t know what a realistic output for a professional artist is and I have no idea how to tell the difference between the artists’ actual works and those imitating their styles, so I assumed the artists credited here were actually making them.

Now I’m wondering whether Izumi Tsubasu really drew all of the Re:Stage! CGs. Though they release only about eight new cards a month nowadays, so I guess that’s probably a reasonable workload?

Should I still add the artist tags to these? Or maybe at least also tag them with check artist? I know official art is exempt from artist tag requirements, but we normally still tag the artist if we have a good idea of who they are.

The same situation happened with Project SEKAI game cg and iXima (see comment on post #5116861). They were previously tagged under her since they have her style and she did make a few promotional art for the game. But I realized they have quality beyond her usual works and there's too many for her to feasibly create alone. After some snooping, I found a page for the game's actual illustration team and created a tag for them, Colorful Palette.

Yeah the safer bet is definitely to just create tags for art teams when you don't know who specifically did it. Official style and artist_name_here_(style) are good for art that's being in-style. You can probably tag the production studio as a whole for these pieces of art rather than specific artists.

You know, this direction would help resolve artist requests on official art posts we have no way of ever really figuring out the (or even if) single artist who created the illustration...

Ylimegirl said:

Yeah the safer bet is definitely to just create tags for art teams when you don't know who specifically did it. Official style and artist_name_here_(style) are good for art that's being in-style. You can probably tag the production studio as a whole for these pieces of art rather than specific artists.

Official style is supposed to be for fan art, so it wouldn't apply to these. I'm also not sure whether *_(style) tags can be used for official art unless it's from someone not associated with the development team. Creating tags for illustration teams sounds like a good idea, but what would you do if you can't find any information on them? What if they only credit the character designer?

Also, isn't it possible that the character designer might make a rough draft of the character (like a storyboard) and leave it to the art team to clean up? That would explain why the official art sometimes lacks characteristics that would be present if it was 100% made by the artist. We normally tag all artists involved in a collaborative work, so if the work uses the character designer's draft as a base, I think the artist would deserve some of the credit. Or to put it another way, how can we be sure that a character designer, as a member of the team developing the game, didn't provide any drafts that would then be developed into the finished pieces?

Even if removing the artist tags is the right move in this case, taking it to its logical conclusion would affect tens of thousands of posts, so I think we need an admin's perspective on this (and any new policies written in a wiki) before making any sweeping changes. I'll continue with my current approach for now since it should be pretty easy to change them all later if I need to.